Novelists From England

"When they're standing right in front of you, kings are a kind of speech impediment."

"Anyway, just because you're sworn enemies doesn't mean you can't be friends, does it?"

"Keep 'em busy. That was one of the three rules of being chief that old Grimm had passed on to him. Act confidently, never say 'I don't know,' and when all else fails, keep 'em busy."

"I wish that the people who sing about the deeds of heroes would think about the people who have to clear up after them."

"On the fifth day the Governor of the town called all the tribal chieftains to an audience in the market square, to hear their grievances. He didn't always do anything about them, but at least they got heard, and he nodded a lot, and everyone felt better about it at least until they got home. This is politics."

"They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings. It's what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it's not been a good day, The Enemy. If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it'd save a lot of trouble later on."

"This book had two authors, and they were both the same person."

"Up until now I'd always thought RSI meant 'I hate my damn job'."

"Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possibly go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent."

"DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot'."

"Too many people want to have written."

"Mort isn't fashionable UK movie material -- there're no parts in it for Hugh or Emma, it's not set in Sheffield, and no one shoves drugs up their bum..."

"I'd like to stand up for the rights of people who put everything on their burger -- chutney, mustard, pickle, mustard pickle, tomato sauce... It is common knowledge in my family that I can't tell the difference between a veggie burger and a meat one, because the ratio of burger to pickles is so high. [either misquoted or mis-thought, since not to be able to tell would mean the burger:pickles ratio is so low]"

"The net software here did its meltdown trick again at the weekend (it happens about once every six months -- if only everything was as reliable as WordPerfect 4.2, which only chews up a novel about once every two or three years...)"

"Death isn't online. If he was, there would be a sudden drop in the death rate. Although it'd be interesting to see if he'd post things like: DON'T YOU THINK I SOUND LIKE JAMES EARL JONES?"

"Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb -- they're often students, for heaven's sake."

"If I heeded all the advice I've had over the years, I'd have written 18 books about Rincewind."

"Currently there's five machines permanently networked here. They all contain the serious core stuff. A couple of the machines are pensioned off 486s, with little other value now. Plus there's two Jaz drives in the building and the portable also carries a fair amount of stuff. Plus every Friday a man comes around and carves all the new stuff onto stone slabs and buries them in the garden... I think I'm okay."

"Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them."

"I always thought Detritus would be good at: "I bet you're wondrin' how many time I fired dis crossbow--""

"I save about twenty drafts — that's ten meg of disc space — and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped."

"I'm referred to, I see, as 'the biggest banker in modern publishing'. Now there's a line that needed the celebrated Guardian proof-reading."

"I must confess the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occurred to him."

"Bognor has always meant to me the quintessential English seaside experience (before all this global warming stuff): driving in the rain to get there, walking around in the rain looking for something to do when you're there, and driving home in the rain again..."

"I was thinking of 'duh?' in the sense of 'a sentence containing several words more than three letters long, and possibly requiring general knowledge or a sense of history that extends past last Tuesday, has been used in my presence.'"

"'I'm sorry,' he said. 'You're Commander Poole, of course. But I'm sure we've never met before.'...He was glad of the encounter, and was pleased to know that Danil was back in normal society. Whether his original crime had been axe-murders or overdue library books should no longer be the concern of his one-time employer; the account had been settled, the books closed. p. 73"

"Yes - crime. Always some... Society's irreducible noise level. What to do? Your solution - prisons. State-sponsored perversion factories - costing ten times average family income to hold one inmate! Utterly crazy... Obviously something very wrong with people who shouted loudest for more prisons - They should be psychoanalysed! But let's be fair - really no alternative before electronic monitoring and control perfected - you should see the joyful crowds smashing the prison walls then - nothing like it since Berlin fifty years earlier! p. 39"

"Once you asked me about crime nowadays - I said any such interest pathological - maybe prompted by the endless sickening television programmes of your time - never able to watch more than few minutes myself... disgusting!"

"Above all, there was the memory - and mystery - of Helena... It had begun as a casual affair, in the early days of his astrotraining, but had become more and more serious as the years went by. Just before he had left for Jupiter, they had planned to make it permanent when he returned. And if he did not, Helena wished to have his child. He still recalled the blend of solemnity and hilarity with which they had made the necessary arrangements..."

"Then, one day, an unusually tasty dish appeared, which brought back vivid memories of the deer - hunts and barbecues of his youth. However, there was something unfamiliar about both flavour and texture, so Poole asked the obvious question. Anderson merely smiled, but for a few seconds Indra looked as if she was about to be sick. Then she recovered and said: 'You tell him - after we've finished eating.'... 'Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time,' Anderson explained. 'Raising animals to - ugh -eat them became economically impossible. I don't know how many acres of land it took to feed one cow, but at least ten humans could survive on the plants... And probably a hundred, with hydroponic techniques. 'But what finished the whole horrible business was not economics - but disease. It started first with cattle, then spread to other food animals - a kind of virus, I believe, that affected the brain, and caused a particularly nasty death.... Synthetic foods were now far cheaper, and you could get them in any flavour you liked. p.32 -33"

"What we find incredible is the way that people - right up to the early 2000s! - calmly accepted behaviour we would consider atrocious. And believed in the most mindboggled... Nonsense, which surely any rational person would dismiss out of hand.'... 'Examples, please.' 'Well... every year in some countries thousands of little girls were hideously mutilated to preserve their virginity? Many of them died - but the authorities turned a blind eye.' 'I agree that was terrible - but what could my government do about it?' 'A great deal - if it wished. But that would have offended the people who supplied it with oil and bought its weapons, like the landmines that killed and maimed civilians by the thousand.' p.32"

"Of course, we in the so-called developed countries thought we were civilized. At least war wasn't respectable any more, and the United Nations was always doing its best to stop the wars that did break out.' 'Not very successfully: I'd give it about three out of ten...'"

"People are always asking me why I've devoted my life to such a horrible period of history, and it's not much of answer to say that there were even worse ones.' 'Then why are you interested in my century?' 'Because it marks the transition between barbarism and civilization.'..."

"I've just had an amusing flashback. All these creatures going in the same direction - they look like the commuters who used to surge back and forth twice a day between home and office, before electronics made it unnecessary. p.29"

"I suppose they can detect sound vibrations - most marine creatures can - though this atmosphere may be too thin to carry my voice very far... Hello, can you hear me? My name is Frank Pool... ahem... I come in peace for all mankind. Makes me feel rather stupid, but can you suggest anything better? And it will be good for the record... Nobody's taking the slightest notice. Big ones and little ones, they're all creeping towards their igloos. Wonder what they actually do when they get there p. 29"

"Within a few days he was being measured for his wings, not in the least like the elegant versions worn by the performers of Swan Lake. Instead of feathers there was a flexible membrane, and when he grasped the hand-holds attached to the supporting ribs, Poole realized that he must look much more like a bat than a bird.... For his first lessons he was restrained by a light harness, so that he did not move anywhere while he was taught the basic strokes - and, most important of all, learned control and stability. Like many acquired skills, it was not quite as easy as it looked. p.27"

"A depressing thought occurred to him, soon after he had started exploring - much of the time in fast-forward - these relics of the past. He had read somewhere that by the turn of the century - his century! - there were approximately fifty thousand television stations broadcasting simultaneously. If that figure had been maintained and it might well have increased - by now millions of millions of hours of TV programming must have gone on the air. So even the most hardened cynic would admit that there were probably at least a billion hours of worthwhile viewing... and millions that would pass the highest standards of excellence. How to find these few - well, few million - needles in so gigantic a haystack? The thought was so overwhelming - indeed, so demoralizing - that after a week of increasingly aimless channel surfing Poole asked for the set to be removed. p. 13"

"Years compress like fault lines in the mind. While everything else changes, the mind remembers exactly what it wants to remember. A decade can be lost and a year seem like forever."

"His mistake was that he traded gods, science for Allah, and hence, traded goals without knowing it. He is as much a manufactured product of his religion as I am of mine, and as much a victim of it. But this is not about victims. Everybody's a victim. That's what Kate Masters prompted me to remember. Before it's done, we all lose everyone and everything that was ever important to us, and then we lose ourselves. We've got to get beyond our own victimhood and take the long view, the view to what we leave behind and what follows us."

"Crane, I love you, but you're bullheaded and blind when you want to be. You preach tolerance, politeness, but you do the same thing everyone else does—you try and build some cumulative tally of pain and loss, then compete to see who got hurt more. You can't base your relationship with the world on that."

"“That’s what I think they’re doing, eating themselves alive. They murder in the name of God and blindly destroy the very ecosystem that sustains them.” “People are people.” Bert shrugged. “What you’re really saying is that people are animals,” Crane replied. “And I say to you, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make a civilization, a real civilization, built on real understanding of ourselves and our universe.”"

"Thinkers prepare the revolution; bandits carry it out."

"Man's bodily functions moved only toward death, but the mind could continue to enrich itself even as everything else embraced entropy."

"People don't know what's good for them; they only know what they want. I learned to keep my expectations low a long time ago. It's good advice for anyone."

"Another cheer. He turned to Newcombe. “Still think I’m crazy?” “Crazy for trying,” the man said. “Brilliant for succeeding.”"

"“I’m giving you an order, lady.” “You’ve probably seen how well I respond to orders,” she said. “Look, you may as well save your breath.”"

"So many people did it that it was no longer an obsession; it was a demographic."

"“The nature of life is struggle, doctor,” Brother Ishmael said. Crane stopped walking and addressed the man. “And the nature of man is to try and rise above the struggle.” “To deny God!” Ishmael persisted. “To make a better world.”"

"“Civilization exists,” Crane said, “by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”"

"“My system saves lives!” Crane sighed and took a long pull from his bottle. “Few would consider that a compelling argument, doctor. Saving money is more to peoples tastes.”"