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 book is not completely written until someone else has read it.
I discovered fantasy and science fiction when I was about 10, and read nothing else for about three years. I ran out of all the books that there were to read in the library. I was keen on reading stuff that took me to other places.
First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.
Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.
This book had two authors, and they were both the same person.
And Sam Vimes thought: Why is Young Sam’s nursery full of farmyard animals anyway? Why are his books full of moo-cows and baa-lambs? He is growing up in the city. He will only see them on a plate! They go sizzle!
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.
I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.
Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.
There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; ocassionally, however, there are alternate pasts.
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.
You can’t die with an unfinished book.
Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‘adult’ DW.
My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.
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.
I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don’t have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that.
The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.