Terry Pratchett Way Quotations

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

I read the 'Old Testament' all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read 'The Origin Of Species', hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

I decided at school that the only sensible way to make a living by arranging words in a pleasing order was by working on newspapers, because you got paid at the end of the week or the end of the month.

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.

SCIENCE: a way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong.

The fastest way to travel is to be there already.

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.

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

There were two ways of looking at the world, but only one when you are starving.

For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.

And when the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible.

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?

It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

... all reputable falconers agreed that for hunting purposes the only way you could reliably bring down prey with a wowhawk was by using it in a slingshot.

Preston, I don't think this creature could ever find its way into your head. Quite apart from anything else, it seems pretty crowded and complicated to me.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

Oh, well...up until now it had been a good day, in a horrible kind of way.

He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk.

There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.

Just call in at the torturer on your way out. See when he can fit you in.

I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf, And me an' my friends can walk towards you with our hats on backwards in a menacing way, Yo!