Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, OBEwas an English author of fantasy novels, especially comical works. He is best known for his Discworld series of 41 novels. Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971; after the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983, he wrote two books a year on average. His 2011 Discworld novel Snuff was at the time of its release the third-fastest-selling hardback adult-readership novel since records began in the...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 April 1948
CityBeaconsfield, England
I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.
I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.
Ye know full well that the meaning of life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery.
Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it.
YOU FEAR TO DIE? "It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break...
Rincewind shivered. He was not, of course, an atheist; on the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists. On the few occasions when he had some spare change he had always made a point of dropping a few coppers into a temple coffer, somewhere, on the principle that a man needed all the friends he could get. But usually he didn't bother the Gods, and he hoped the Gods wouldn't bother him. Life was quite complicated enough.
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.
I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?" Death thought about it. CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.
And what would humans be without love?" RARE, said Death.
If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.
Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you're going to live another few hours.
I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds, if I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.
I have vowed that rather than let Alzheimer's take me, I would take it, i would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the Brompton Cocktail some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with death.