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
If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.
I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.
Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.
I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
I read the 'Old Testament' all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read 'The Origin Of Species', hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
I don't think about the end game. I've got lots to occupy my mind. It's the rage that keeps me going.
Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.
It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air.
You get all sorts of people in the library, and the librarian gets it all...
This was the definition of eternity; it was the space of time devised by the Great God Om to ensure that everyone got the punishment that was due to them.
It must be hard for humans, forever floundering through inconvenient geography. Humans are always lost. It's a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.