Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, OBEwas an English author of fantasy novels, especially comical works. He is best known for his Discworld series of 41 novels. Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971; after the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983, he wrote two books a year on average. His 2011 Discworld novel Snuff was at the time of its release the third-fastest-selling hardback adult-readership novel since records began in the...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 April 1948
CityBeaconsfield, England
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?
It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.
It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.
Everyone should occasionally break the law in some small and delightful way. It's good for the hygiene of the brain.
It is a mistake trying to cheer up camels. You may as well drop meringues into a black hole.
Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.
It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.
I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.
You can't die with an unfinished book.
I don't really plan. I'm almost intuitive about things.
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.