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.
— Terry Pratchett
I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.
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.
Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.
I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.
Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.
I don't believe in the war god of the Israelites. He's a bogeyman. Jesus preached the golden rule, by and large.
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.
When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.
I've often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.
Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.
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.
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'.
Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.
I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don't have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that.
I've got wide tastes, but I don't like jazz.
I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.
Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'
'Nation' was one that I'd have killed myself if I hadn't written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.
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 are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.
I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.
The harder I work, the luckier I become.
By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.
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.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book.
Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.
It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.
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.
You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.
I think I work much harder on the children's books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I've never been quite certain why this is.
I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.
That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?
Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That's something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.
The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.
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.
I don't think about the end game. I've got lots to occupy my mind. It's the rage that keeps me going.
It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases - one was Alzheimer's, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer's.
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.
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.
In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.
There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.
I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
Siren voices tell me, 'You don't have to keep going on.' And then you think, 'I'm a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?' I don't know. I like being a writer.
I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
I don't really plan. I'm almost intuitive about things.
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 do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people's memories for a while.
The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it's just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.
