In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.
— Terry Pratchett
For an author, the nice characters aren't much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They're doing it for themselves.
When you're all singing together, it brings things together. I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang.
Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.
If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.
An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.
Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about 'Wind in the Willows' and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought - you know about 'The Wind in the Willows.'
I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In 'The Colour of Magic' most of the city is set alight. It's a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.'
My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.
I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
I think it does Discworld good if I don't write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.
I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.
No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
I'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.
The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.
It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.
One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.
It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
When you read, I'm sure you don't realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don't do that.
I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably 'Doctor Who.' What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.
I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.
My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.
The bravest person I've ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.
I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, 'If wet, in the library.' Who could say that this is bad?
What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.
It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.
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?
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.
Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
The thing is, 'Discworld' had been going on for a very long time, and I've written children's books as well. Usually when people have a really big series they franchise it, which I thought is a bit of a no-no, so I thought what I'd do is I'd franchise it to myself.
I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It's a speech-to-text program, and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.
Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.
Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.
I like being a writer.
It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.
There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.
I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.
I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.
I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. 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.
You can't die with an unfinished book.
I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven't heard of anyone who's got better from Alzheimer's.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
