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The point is that if a book that had been published three years ago started to sell twice as many all of a sudden it probably wouldn't even get no­ticed. People wouldn't be tracking it. The system has cleaned up its act an awful lot but the best-seller list system is not an entirely foolproof 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
Years
Probably
Lists
Seller
People
Point
Entirely
Cleaned
Three
Sell
Tracking
Best
Sells
Sellers
Book
Awful
Published
Many
Wouldn
Sudden
Even
Started
List
Thing
System
Twice
Foolproof

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There's a door, he whispered. Where does it go? It stays where it is, I think, said Rincewind.
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This wasn't food - it was what food became if it had been good and gone to food heaven.
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The short conversation that follows eventually led to a tree religion. Its tenet of faith was this: a tree that was a good tree and led a clean decent and upstanding life could be assured of a future life after death. If it was very good indeed it would eventually be reincarnated as five thousand rolls of lavatory paper.
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Five exclamation marks: the sure sign of an insane mind.
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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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She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do. And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella.
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Any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realize that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake.
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He talks pretty big for a gutter wizard, he muttered. You don't understand at all, said the wizard wearily. I'm so scared of you my spine has turned to jelly, it's just that I'm suffering from an overdose of terror right now. I mean, when I've got over that then I'll have time to be decently frightened of you.
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I stroll along, talk, I sign books, people buy me drinks, I forget where my hotel is, I get lost and fall into some local body of water... done it hundreds of times.
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Yes, sir, thank you, sir, and I wouldn’t trust me one little inch, sir. I knows a bad one when I sees them. I have a mirror.
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People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.
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There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.
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There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.
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It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.
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And 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.
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Just call in at the torturer on your way out. See when he can fit you in.
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Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
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Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.
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Now he knew: They were real. Who’d make up a thing like this? Okay, one of them was a cheese that rolled around of its own accord, but nobody was perfect.
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Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
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