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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Terry Pratchett

Write

Side

Head

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was a very keen reader of science fiction. "

" I've often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed. "

" Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds. "

" I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's. "

" I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood. "

" 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. "

" Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. "

" Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up. "

Terry Pratchett

Hands

Always

" Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages. "

" In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it. "

" 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. "

Terry Pratchett

Imagination

Wild

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind. "

" I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first. "