Short Story Writers From England

"It seemed proper indeed to crowd the pages with children, for in real life they run all over; the world is covered thickly with the prints of their little footsteps, though, as a rule, books written for grown-up people are kept almost clear of them."

"I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered."

"Our own faces, seen suddenly, will sometimes tell us things concerning ourselves that we did not suspect before."

"[O]ne must have a certain amount of both intelligence and knowledge to be amazed even at the most extraordinary things."

"[T]his is a woman-ridden age. Yet it is but fair to confess that all the former ones were man-ridden ages. What we want is a happy proportion."

"[U]gliness of the right sort is a kind of beauty. It has some of the best qualities of beauty—it attracts observation and fixes the memory."

"[W]e wish for more in life, rather than for more of it."

"I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking, I assume, said it was an act of God. You shouldn't say something like that to the kind of kid who will grow up to be a writer; we have long memories."

"Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again."

"There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist. But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should. It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I'm not used to this. As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book ... But since contracting Alzheimer's disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is that I really, if anything, believe."

"Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living."

"Everything makes sense a bit at a time. But when you try to think of it all at once, it comes out wrong."

"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs."

"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. (p.230, in the edition published in 1991 by Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-04979-0)"

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."

"The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them..."

"'You're not going to die, are you sir?' he said. 'Of course I am. Everyone is. That's what being alive is all about.'"

"Perhaps, if you knew you were going to die, your senses crammed in as much detail as they could while they still had the chance..."

"AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER."

""I will not feel sorry for myself for contracting Alzheimer's, I will make Alzheimer's sorry for catching me!" Interview with BBC Radio 5 Live regarding Terry's Alzheimer's diagnosis"

"Tolkien's dead. J. K. Rowling said no. Philip Pullman couldn't make it. Hi, I'm Terry Pratchett."

"It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. This is in fact true. It's called living."

"I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else."

""I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do', but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry." - after announcing his Alzheimer's diagnosis."

""I don't mind authority, but not authoritarian authority. After all, the bus driver is allowed to be the boss of the bus. But if he's bad at driving, he's not going to be a bus driver anymore." Interview with Cory Doctorow"

"So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa? More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from? Me, actually — the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2. It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds. I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from."

"Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example. Possibly because of this, I have never disliked religion. I think it has some purpose in our evolution. I don't have much truck with the "religion is the cause of most of our wars" school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God. I number believers of all sorts among my friends. Some of them are praying for me. I'm happy they wish to do this, I really am, but I think science may be a better bet."

"I don't believe. I never have, not in big beards in the sky."

"As a boy I had a clear image of the Almighty: He had a tail coat and pinstriped trousers, black, slicked-down hair and an aquiline nose. On the whole, I was probably a rather strange child, and I wonder what my life might have been like if I'd met a decent theologian when I was nine."

"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.'"

""Out of Print" is bookseller speak for "We can't be hedgehogged"."

"I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did."

"In Reading [England] there is this thing called the IDR, short for "Inner Distribution Road", which is bureaucratese for "Big thing that cost a lot of money and relieves traffic problems, provided all your traffic wants to orbit the town centre permanently". It's a 2-3 lane dual carriageway that goes round the town centre. It has lots of roundabouts, an overhead section, a couple of spare motorway-like exits (that's British motorways -- y'know, the roundabout with the main road going under it), and a thing called the Watlington Street Gyratory, where you have to get in lane for your intended destination about three years and two corners before you get there with no signposting. I used to cycle along it every day to get to school, before I fell off at 35 mph. [Kids! Don't try this at home!] I know it well. I believe it is impossible to leave Reading heading west."

"I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said "You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm". At the time this was the last thing on my mind..."

"What you have here is an example of that well known phenomenon, A Bookshop Assistant Who Knows Buggerall But Won't Admit It (probably some kind of arts graduate)."

"I have to admit that I drive past Bridgwater quite regularly. And fast."

"I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow."

"I mean, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I'm me."

"This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic."

"A true beanie should have a propellor on the top."