I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.
The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.
It’s very rare that I ever go and research a particular subject. Mostly I do serendipitous research, I read stuff, things spinning out of the page.
Vimes had got around to a Clean Desk policy. It was a Clean Floor strategy that eluded him at the moment.
Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.
Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.
Incidentally, it’s best not to argue with the nursing staff. I find the best course of action is to throw some chocolates in one direction and hurry off in the other while their attention is distracted.
Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.
The best research is the research that you don’t know that you are doing.
Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.
Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.
I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.
Inside every lump of coal there’s a diamond waiting to get out.
If you really want to upset a witch, do her a favor which she has no means of repaying. The unfulfilled obligation will nag at her like a hangnail.
First of all you are a writer, a writer is what you are, so it doesn’t actually stop the moment you leave your desk, your computer, your keyboard, whatever. Something is operating the back of your mind.
She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it.
One person is nothing. Two people are a nation.
There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.
His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn’t really happened and, if it had happened, hadn’t happened much.