Terry Pratchett

“Freedom without limits is just a word.”

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

“There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.”

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

“It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.”

“Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.”

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

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

“Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.”

“The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.”

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

“I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.”

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

“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.”

“It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.”

“The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?”

“In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.”

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

“My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.”

“It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.”

“I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.”