Terry Pratchett

All this books and stuff, that isn't what it should all be about. What we need is real wizardry.All is not well within the Unseen University. The endemic politics of the place have ensured that it has finally got what it wished for: the most powerful…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse.And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocen…

'Holy wood is a different sort of place. People act differently here. Everywhere else the most important things are gods or money or cattle. Here, the most important thing is to be important.'People might say that reality is a quality that things pos…

'Look after the dead', said the priests, 'and the dead will look after you.'Wise words in all probability, but a tall order when you have just become the pharaoh of a small and penniless country whose largesse - and indeed treasury - is unlikely to s…

Moist von Lipwig is a con artist and a fraud and a man faced with a life choice: be hanged, or put Ankh-Morpork's ailing postal service back on its feet.It was a tough decision. But he's got to see that the mail gets though, come rain, hail, sleet, d…

It begun as a sudden strange fancy . . .Polly Perks had to become a boy in a hurry. Cutting off her hair and wearing trousers was easy. Learning to fart and belch in public and walk like an ape took more time . . .And now she's enlisted in the army, …

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.There are some situations where the correct response is to display the sort of ignorance which happily and wilfully flies in the face of the fa…

'Look after the dead', said the priests, 'and the dead will look after you.'Wise words in all probability, but a tall order when you have just become the pharaoh of a small and penniless country whose largesse - and indeed treasury - is unlikely to s…

'A foot on the neck is nine points of the law'There are many who say that the art of diplomacy is an intricate and complex dance between two informed partners, determined by an elaborate set of elegant and unwritten rules. There are others who mainta…

'Things have to come to an end, see. That's how it works when you turn the world into stories. You should never have done that. You shouldn't treat people like they was characters, like they was things. But if you do, then you've got to know where th…

Time is a resource. Everyone knows it has to be managed. You mess with it at your peril. You can let it move fast or slowly but what you mustn't do is allow it to stop.  On the Discworld time management is the job of the Monks of History, who store i…

It begun as a sudden strange fancy . . .Polly Perks had to become a boy in a hurry. Cutting off her hair and wearing trousers was easy. Learning to fart and belch in public and walk like an ape took more time . . .And now she's enlisted in the army, …

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch had it all.But now he's back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck...Living in the past is hard. Dying in the past is incredibly easy. …

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.There are some situations where the correct response is to display the sort of ignorance which happily and wilfully flies in the face of the fa…

'The people next door oppress me all night long. I tell them, I work all day, a man's got to have some time to learn to play the tuba. That's oppression, that is. If I'm not under the heel of the oppressor I don't know who is.'An aura of mean-minded …

'What shall we do?' said Twoflower.'Panic?' said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival.As it moves towards a seemingly inevitable collision with a malevolent red star, the Discworld could do with a hero. What i…

Things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folks; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle.Three witches gathered on a lonely heath. A king cruelly murdered, his throne usurped by his amb…

'When you start believing in Spirits, you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are, you're believing in Gods. And then you're in trouble.'Reality is all very well in small doses. It's a perfectly conventional and convenient w…

'Things have to come to an end, see. That's how it works when you turn the world into stories. You should never have done that. You shouldn't treat people like they was characters, like they was things. But if you do, then you've got to know where th…

Mightily Oats has not picked a good time to be priest.He thought he'd come to the mountain kingdom of Lancre for a simple little religious ceremony. Now he's caught up in a war between vampires and witches, and he's not sure there is a right side.The…