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You have to start out learning to believe the little lies. So we can believe the big ones? Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.

Terry Pratchett

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Terry Pratchett
Age: 66 †
Born: 1948
Born: April 28
Died: 2015
Died: March 12
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Terence David John Terry Pratchett
Terence David John Pratchett
Sir Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John Pratchett
Thing
Learning
Believe
Sort
Justice
Start
Lying
Mercy
Bigs
Lies
Littles
Duty
Little
Ones

More quotes by Terry Pratchett

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Multiple exclamation marks, he went on, shaking his head, are a sure sign of a diseased mind.
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The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honest.
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But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.
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All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel - or if there was, it was an oncoming train.
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There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.
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By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.
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But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.
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You can't kill me, I've got a magic... AAAARGH !
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Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.
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Freedom without limits is just a word.
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I'm not cruel, sir, I won't shoot you in the guts, but I will make you realize how much you took your toes for granted.
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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.
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I don't regret it, you know. I would do it all again. Children are our hope for the future. THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death. What does it contain, then? ME.
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You can't inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol.
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Either dragons should exist completely or fail to exist at all, he felt. A dragon only half-existing was worse than the extremes.
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Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.
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So much paperwork to read! So much paperwork to push away! So much paperwork to pretend he hadn't received and that might have been eaten by gargoyles.
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The best research you can do is to talk to people.
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I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.
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Actors, said Granny, witheringly. As if the world weren't full of enough history without inventing more.
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