Terry Pratchett: Trending quotes (page 4)

Terry Pratchett trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Terry Pratchett: 1592   quotes 904   likes

“While a book has got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the reader it's got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the writer as well.”

Terry Pratchett

alt.fan.pratchett (1 December 1998) http://www.lspace.org/fandom/afp/timelines/discussions/is-pterry-going-downhill.html
Usenet

Books

“The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them…”

Terry Pratchett The Nome Trilogy

Truckers, Ch. 7
The Nome Trilogy (1989 - 1990)

Way

“What would Deftmenes be if we went around obeying orders all the time?'
'They might be ruling the Carpet,' said Pismire.
'Ha!' said Brocando, 'but the trouble about obeying orders is, it becomes a habit. And then everything depends on who's giving the orders.”

Terry Pratchett book The Carpet People

The Carpet People (1971; 1992)

Time , Dependency

“Boot-faced cats aren't born but made, often because they've tried to outstare or occasionally rape a speeding car and have been repaired by a vet who just pulled all the bits together and stuck the stitches in where there was room.”

Terry Pratchett book The Unadulterated Cat

The Unadulterated Cat (1989)

Cars , Cats , Speed

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

Terry Pratchett

alt.fan.pratchett (22 November 1993) http://www.lspace.org/ftp/words/pqf/pqf
Usenet

“I was thinking of 'duh?' in the sense of 'a sentence containing several words more than three letters long, and possibly requiring general knowledge or a sense of history that extends past last Tuesday, has been used in my presence.”

Terry Pratchett

Usenet

History , Knowledge , Thinking , Sense

“Well … welcome. My house is your house', his brow suddenly furrowed and he looked worried, 'although only in a metaphorical sense, you understand, because I would not, much as I always admired your straightforward approach, and indeed your forthright stance, actually give you my house, it being the only house I have, and therefore the term is being extended in an, as it were, gratuitous fashion”

Terry Pratchett book The Carpet People

The Carpet People (1971; 1992)

Fashion , Understanding , Sense , Housing

“My programming language was solder.”

Terry Pratchett

On his early computers, from a talk "When I Were A Lad, We Used To Dream of 64K" at the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland, (August 2005)
General sources

“As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.”

Terry Pratchett

Relatively Einstein http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/relativelyeinstein.shtml episode 3, "Fantasy Physics" (18 January 2005); the Discworld version of this statement appears in Night Watch (2002)
General sources

“I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce”

Terry Pratchett

Usenet

“In Reading [England] there is this thing called the IDR, short for "Inner Distribution Road", which is bureaucratese for "Big thing that cost a lot of money and relieves traffic problems, provided all your traffic wants to orbit the town centre permanently". It's a 2-3 lane dual carriageway that goes round the town centre. It has lots of roundabouts, an overhead section, a couple of spare motorway-like exits (that's British motorways -- y'know, the roundabout with the main road going under it), and a thing called the Watlington Street Gyratory, where you have to get in lane for your intended destination about three years and two corners before you get there with no signposting. I used to cycle along it every day to get to school, before I fell off at 35 mph. [Kids! Don't try this at home! ] I know it well. I believe it is impossible to leave Reading heading west.”

Terry Pratchett

Usenet

Money , School , Home , Problem

“I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.”

Terry Pratchett

Usenet

Universe

“Currently there's five machines permanently networked here. They all contain the serious core stuff. A couple of the machines are pensioned off 486s, with little other value now. Plus there's two Jaz drives in the building and the portable also carries a fair amount of stuff. Plus every Friday a man comes around and carves all the new stuff onto stone slabs and buries them in the garden… I think I'm okay.”

Terry Pratchett

Usenet

Thinking

“Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of them wanders into the cave and starts to purr.”

Terry Pratchett book The Unadulterated Cat

The Unadulterated Cat (1989)

Animals

“It's an interesting fact that fewer than 17 % of Real cats end their lives with the same name they started with. Much family effort goes into selecting one at the start ("She looks like a Winnifred to me"), and the as the years roll by it suddenly finds itself being called Meepo or Ratbag.”

Terry Pratchett book The Unadulterated Cat

The Unadulterated Cat (1989)

Family , Cats , Effort

“Normally its narrow streets were crowded with stalls, and people from all over the Carpet. They'd all be trying to cheat one another in that open-and-above-board way known as 'doing business.”

Terry Pratchett book The Carpet People

The Carpet People (1971; 1992)

People , Way , Business , Cheating

“Too many people want to have written.”

Terry Pratchett

Usenet

People

“The Deftmenes are mad and the Dumii are sane, thought Snibril, and that's just the same as being mad except that it's quieter. If only you could mix them together, you'd end up with normal people.”

Terry Pratchett book The Carpet People

The Carpet People (1971; 1992)

People , Madness

“As a boy I had a clear image of the Almighty: He had a tail coat and pinstriped trousers, black, slicked-down hair and an aquiline nose.
On the whole, I was probably a rather strange child, and I wonder what my life might have been like if I'd met a decent theologian when I was nine.”

Terry Pratchett

"I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist" (2008)

Life , Boy