Terry Pratchett Quotes

“Terry didn’t really do deference around famous people. I was once in a position, in Dublin, to introduce him to Bono from U2, explaining, as I did so, that Bono owned the hotel we were standing in. ‘Ah, good,’ Terry said to Bono. ‘Can you get me a milkshake?’ Which he did.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“William Pratchett’s last words on this earth were an anguished cry of, ‘I haven’t had my custard yet.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“Your reward for doing something good,’ Terry has taken to saying, ‘is to do something else good.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.

Terry took Death's arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black dessert under the endless night.

THE END.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“... he described himself in interviews as 'hallucinating gently for a living.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“So what was this place in which people were rewarded for working out the answer the teacher wanted them to give, rather than the right answer?”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“I do not know what solace she found in the tiny, stricken face,’ Terry said, ‘but now I see the face of a humble carpenter who was moved to tell people to be kind to one another – the golden rule of so many wise men – and for his pains was tortured to death by a tyrant at the behest of zealots. Perhaps the message may be to ignore tyrants and tumble zealots.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“he eventually traded his old blue Ford Mondeo for a Jaguar – the traditional marque of the self-made working-class man. At the same time, it was a Jaguar S-Type, the least extravagant Jaguar money could buy. Indeed, the S-Type was the closest a person could get to owning a Ford while actually owning a Jaguar.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“Terry was, in many ways, given his circumstances, a startlingly non-acquisitive person. He kept it horizontal.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“Terry didn’t really do deference around famous people. I was once in a position, in Dublin, to introduce him to Bono from U2, explaining, as I did so, that Bono owned the hotel we were standing in. ‘Ah, good,’ Terry said to Bono. ‘Can you get me a milkshake?’ Which he did.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“At one point in the ensuing interview, Tony asked Terry what advice he would give his younger self. ‘Get more sex while you can,’ Terry straight away replied.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“Colleagues say I put the phone down very carefully,’ Terry wrote, ‘went and got a cup of coffee, stared out of the window for a while, then rang him back and said, “What?”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“This is the author saying this, folks. Do not start at the beginning with Discworld.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“I realized what troubled me about traditional news journalism,’ Terry wrote. ‘There was hardly any time to get to the truth that lay behind the facts.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“As with his original paperwork with the Bucks Free Press, Terry’s father had to sign it because Terry, despite being three months married by now and a homeowner, was still almost four months shy of attaining the age of majority.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“He filed a highly supportive article, which appeared in May 1968, headlined with a quote from Bander: ‘Education Should Not Be A Political Toy’.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“They had wanted to buy an older semi-detached place that was on the market but it was far simpler at the time to get a mortgage on a newly built ‘starter home’,”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“As Terry wrote, ‘My dad, being a Dave, had automatic contact with the secret fraternity of Daves who dispensed antique spares from junk yards and garages and strange and secret sheds under railway arches.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“It was during this debate that Pratchett added another meaning to the word “autocracy”, that is, “government by autos”.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“conversation openers, ranging from the more or less straightforward (‘You don’t like Weetabix’, ‘You can’t spell amateur’) via the openly flirtatious (‘You have sexy feet’), to the outright surreal (‘You have eyes in your hair and are frightened by crippled moths’, ‘You played with spaghetti in a Hieronymus machine’, ‘You appreciate the turgid turmoil of a torn soul’).”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“It was a lifelong position of Terry’s that schools would be far better places if they took special care to look out for and nurture the twits and the dreamers.”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

“He seemed overall to lack the ability to concentrate – or at any rate to concentrate on the things the teachers wanted him to concentrate on, and at the times in the day when the teachers wanted him to do so. ‘I could hang upside down in the hazelnut tree in our garden for hours at a time,’ Terry noted,”
― Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography