Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. ‚The Lord of the Rings‘ is intensely… landscaped. But ‚Discworld‘ is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

The best way to resolve any problem in the human world is for all sides to sit down and talk.

People love westerns worldwide. There’s something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It’s a simpler time. There’s no organized laws and stuff.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

In every movie I do have a dialogue.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.

I like Aurora, ‚Sleeping Beauty,‘ because she’s just sleeping and looking pretty and waiting for boys to come kiss her. Sounds like a good life – lots of naps and cute boys fighting dragons to come kiss you.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

Dialogue means debates and everyone’s point of view.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

I sell escapism.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

Doing collections, doing fashion is like a non-stop dialogue.

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

I used to pretend that my Peugeot driving to the gym in the rain in Dublin was a Ferrari on the Vegas strip.

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.

The ‚peace movement‘ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

The blurring of fantasy and reality is something that the Japanese herald in their life, in their day-to-day commercialism.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.

Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

I don’t think it is so difficult to solve the problems between Cuba and the United States; it all depends on whether there is a dialogue, a discussion, or if the prejudices and hatred of people like the extremists and terrorists from the Cuban community, who try to impose their policies, prevail.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

My imagination is a twisted place.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.