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

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

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.

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

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

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

Sooner or later we're all someone's dog.

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.

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

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

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

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting "All the Gods are bastards."

'Discworld' is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

'Nation' was one that I'd have killed myself if I hadn't written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

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

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.

Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

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.

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'

I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.

I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It's a speech-to-text program, and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people's memories for a while.

I don't really plan. I'm almost intuitive about things.

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

I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.

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

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.

I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, 'If wet, in the library.' Who could say that this is bad?

I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven't heard of anyone who's got better from Alzheimer's.

I like being a writer.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.