Terry Pratchett: Back in Black

Terry Pratchett: They say your life flashes in front of your eyes before you die. Thus is true. It is called living. But nobody's really dead until all the ripples they have created on Earth completely died away, so as long as my words and my stories are still sploshing around the planet, there's life in the old dog yet.

Terry Pratchett: My life on the whole has been that of a ping-pong ball in a hurricane - I just went where the winds blew me.

Terry Pratchett: When you're a journalist, you're taught very quickly that there's no such thing as writer's block, because there will be some unsympathetic bloke screaming in your earhole to get the bloody thing written.

Terry Pratchett: There is an ancient myth that the world is traveling through space on the back of a giant turtle. There is a version of that myth that claims there are four giant elephants set on the top of it. I remember reading about it in a book on astronomy. I filched it and ran away before the alarms went off.

Terry Pratchett: Thinking about it now, I was probably at my happiest in that library. All I ever tried to do from that time on was to pass on all the fun I'd had with words.

Terry Pratchett: The most popular character in my books is Death, your genuine, bona fide, seven-foot tall hooded skeletal figure with a horse called Binky. I simply ask the questionm if Death were a real person, what will he do on his afternoons off?

Terry Pratchett: He is, in short, a kindly death. Utterly fascinated by human beings and their capacity to find a bother in the short time that they spend on Earth.

Neil Geiman: As for Terry's best book, Night Watch os the deepest, the darkest, and the most human.

Terry Pratchett: Imagine you're in a very, very slow-motion car crash. Nothing seems to be happening at all. There might be the odd banging noise possibly, a little crunching sound here and there. A screw might pop out and spin its way across the dashboard as if you were in Apollo 13. But the radio's blasting rock and roll. The heaters are on and it doesn't seem all that bad. Except for the certain knowledge that, at some point, your head is going to go smashing through that windscreen.

Rob Wilkins: Terry got really angry at his disease because now he could see how it was affecting him, how it was tripping him up. And I knew we were up against it for time. We had to get these words down with the white heat, taht white anger driving him to write seven more novels, through the haze of Alzheimer's.

Val McDermid: I remember buying this and thinking, I don't want to read it. Because it was the last.

Val McDermid: ...one of the things I think is done very well in Terry's books is that when people come to the end of the line, he lets them die. And Granny Weatherwax, in The Shepherd's Crown, comes to the end of her days. There's a sort of pragmatic honesty to it that really, it really touched me when I first read this, it definitely brought a tear to my eye. I don't know if I could write with that much joy if I knew I was dying.

"It was a strange night. The owls hooted almost nonstop and the wind outside, for some reason, made the wicks of the candles inside wobble with a vengeance, and then blow out.
"The the darkness spoke.
"'Esmeralda Weatherwax, we have met so many times before, haven't we?'
"'Too many to count, Mr Reaper. Well, you've finally got me, you old bugger. I've had my season, no doubt about it, and I was never one for pushing myself forward or complaining.'
"There was no light. No point of reference except for the two tiny blue pinpricks sparkling in the eye sockets of Death himself.
"'Well, the journey was woth taking, and I saw many wonderful things on the way, including you, my reliable friend. Shakk we go now?'
"'Madame... We've already gone.'"

Rhianna Pratchett: When you lose someone close, you're sort of, they're always part of you, and you're always taking... a piece of them with you, I think.

Terry Pratchett: Whrn I was a boy, all I ever wanted was my own observatory. I knew even then that all the mysteries of life lay hidden in the stars. Having said that, stars aren't that important. Whereas street lamps, they're very important. Why? Because they're so rare. As far as we know, there's only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys who also came up with philosophy, telescopes, E=mc². And I have to say I('m very proud to have been one of them.

Terry Pratchett: Well, I'm off now. You're in charge.

—
+ Quotes on the IMDb