Real-Life

Quotes from ‘I Stared Death in the Face’

–interview with The Northern Echo, April 2007

“It’s a bit depressing really - the ink is hardly dry on the paper, you haven’t actually banked the cheque and so, with the new book in their hand they say ‘Right, when’s the next book coming out?’.

“The [question] an author really likes is ‘are there any more in the pipeline?’. I swear that one day I shall thump the table and say, ‘there is no pipeline! There’s this guy sitting, banging his head on the computer screen, trying to finish this book’.”

“[Discworld is] what Middle Earth would be like 500 years later if things evolved like they did here”.

“There’s this old thing about fantasy being something that’s read by 14-year-old boys. Actually that’s quite wrong. Half the population can’t help the fact they’re male and if you’re 14 years old, well, you grow out of it in 12 months.”

“… my readership now is just everywhere. Even British Airways flight attendants have turned out to be fans and if you can crack that I think you can get anywhere. Or when I was in the States a few weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security guy turned out to be a fan and was nice enough to tell me whilst fingerprinting me - as you do.”

On Filming Hogfather: “I have a very small role and I play the little old toy shop owner whose job it is to look absolutely terrified at the fact that Death is standing in front of him, which was not difficult because there was Marnix (Van Den Broeke, who animated Death’s robe and skull) - I think he was six foot six anyway and he’d got built-up shoes - so you’re looking at the better part of a seven foot tall Grim Reaper, with glowing blue eyes. Seeing a figment of your imagination standing in front of you is bad enough, but out of camera this little hand came out of the robe and gave me a thumbs up. And that came close to freaking me out, but it certainly achieved the effect - I looked suitably scared.”

“What I thought about it when [the prospect of the Hogfather film] came up was, I’m pretty certain that these people are going to make a version of Hogfather that’s going to be reasonably true to the book and they have got in movie terms an incredibly low budget but they seem to be very ingenious and I’m absolutely certain that there aren’t going to be any car chases in it. That’s the thing that you have to watch out for: when someone suggests they really like it but it would be a lot better if it could be set in LA in the present day and have a car chase, and somehow that just wouldn’t have worked with Hogfather.”

“[Fantasy] gives me a couple of different colours in the paintbox I would say. That’s what fantasy does - you get everything, so I can write cop novels, I can write murder mysteries, I can write romances. But they’re all like I used to say - put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.”

“Would I actually live in Discworld? No, because it’s made up by me. It would be too much of a job. And people would come along and bang on my door and smash my windows. No, I’m very clear - it’s a lot of fun and for a few hours it’s a nice place to visit, but this is where I eat and sleep.”

Quotes from Terry Pratchett Live Chat

–live chat at the Douglas Adams Continuum

“I think fantasy will be with us as long as we’re human.”

“There’s just so many kinds of plot available when you start with a bunch of coppers!”

“I get a kick out of [writing] … When a book is going well, I’m on a high.”

“… mostly I write the story to see where it wants to go. I kind of go with the grain.”

“I don’t have a secret desire to write something else—if I did, I’d do it.”

“One book a year is not punishing, but life seems to fill up with other things.”

“When I do read fiction, then it’t [sic] generally crime/ comedt [sic], like Carl Hiassen or Donald Westlake. I seldom read fantasy!”

“I met [Douglas Adams] only once, at a crowded party, where it [w]as almost impossible to be heard, and I think we were almost immediately dragged in opposite directions by people who wanted us to meet interesting people. I have no idea if we would have got on. I was in a hotel in Chicago when I read that he had died, and I sang the Betelgeusian Death Anthem, all by myself. It was a shame.”

Quotes from ‘12 Days of Hogswatch’

–iTunes podcast

“On Discworld, [Hogswatch is] celebrated in pretty much the same way [as Christmas]: eating family meals, unwanted presents. But possibly there’s a bit more to it as well.”

“I suppose you could call the Hogfather the spirit of Hogswatch. He wears, very typically, a red coat with white trimmings which just happen to typify the midwinter celebrations down all the ages, and let us be clear: they were not always nice. They often involved the old-style sacrifice where the blood would be on the snow. But he’s now nice. He turns up in department stores and gives the little kiddies presents and no one really remembers now the darkness behind it all.”

“What [Auditors] hate is life, because life is messy. Life is hard to control. What they like is dust and gas, and things never changing for millions of years. Regrettably, however, there are certain rules. They cannot directly interfere. It would be very nice from their point of view just to drop a great big asteroid on us and have done.”

“All [Auditors] can do is, shall we say, encourage us to destroy ourselves.”

“The wizards found that, after Hex had been built, most of the really bright young students spent all their time, all night in fact, playing games on Hex, or programming Hex, or just sitting around Hex eating miscellaneous quantities of pizza.”

“Ankh-Morpork’s city watch was just a ragtag bunch of all the drunken watchmen, until comparatively recently in the city’s history, and under the command of Commander Vimes is now quite a force in the city–almost up to normal policing standards.”

“Hereditar[iness] works slightly oddly on the Disc, and although both her parents were fully human beings, certain Death-like characteristics were transmitted to Susan. She’s embarrassed about this.”

“[Death] cannot help rather liking us. I think he find[s] it rather worrying that people fear [him], because what they really fear is deprivation, pain, loss, illness … whereas Death, in fact comes after. Death is the last friend that people ever see.”

Quotes from ‘The Making of Hogfather’

–iTunes Podcast

“The Discworld resembles one of the classic images of our own planet, which was that it is flat and goes through space on four enormous elephants which ride on the back of a giant turtle.”

“I would describe [Discworld] as a fantasy universe, but a modern fantasy universe. It’s what Lord of the Rings would turn out like 500 years on, you know, when all the battles were over and everyone had to settle down. So the trolls, and the dwarves, the elves, and all the rest of them became citizens–became modern people as we think of them today.”

“Discworld is, of course, quite real, but it’s very nearly unreal. It’s right at the end of the curve between real and unreal.”

“Hogswatch had already been created as the Discworld mid-winter festival which is approximately appropriate to Christmas. And Hogfather is something like the jolly red-and-white man we know today.”

This all began in the early 1980s and really I suppose [Discworld] was initially an antidote to fantasy.”

“I wanted to write [a book] about what makes us human, and what makes us human is really our imaginations.”

“Is it a good thing that children believe in the tooth fairy or believe in the Hogfather (or shall we say Father Christmas)? Yes. We need to train our imagination on the little lies, so we can believe the big lies like justice, truth, and by taking them seriously, make them into something real.”

“We need to train our imagination on the little lies, so we can believe the big lies like justice, truth, and by taking them seriously, make them into something that is real.”

On acting the toymaker in the Hogfather film: “For various reasons, I was quite suspicious for quite a long time into this process [of making Hogfather]: thinking it’s too good to be true, it can’t possibly happen–and I think the day when it suddenly came alive for me was when I went … to be tried out for my costume, and I was there for about an hour. They were really trying to get it right. And I was ever so pleased, especially with the shoes; they were the kind of shoes that [indistinct] would have thrown away. They were actually marvelous, and I thought ‘this is really going to happen. And they’re really taking it seriously. And it really is going to happen.’”

“[The toymaker in Hogfather has] the same kind of look you get from … Victorian guys who spent all their time in the library, you know what I mean? A bit hunched, bit confused, very very wrapped up in what he does.”

“Characters on Discworld always gravitate towards the golden age for that type of profession, so barbers are always barbershop quartet members, ladies of the night are always approximately wearing the clothing of late nineteenth-century Paris, and a toymaker has to look as if he’s just created Pinocchio.”

On his costume as the toymaker in the Hogfather TV adaptation: “It’s a terrible thing to say, but we might have achieved a look here. Dear me, maybe here is an end to wearing black.”

On his role as the toymaker in the Hogfather TV adaptation: “I think I have about 27 words to say. I think I’m on set for a very small amount of time. I think we’ll all be over and done with in five minutes.”

“[Filming is] very exhausting. It’s the standing around that wears you out. I think the highlight for me was when they said ‘Cut! That’s a wrap.’ and all that sort of thing and ‘You can go now.’ That was a good day. I really liked that.”

“I didn’t think [the Hogfather production] was going to be this good. I didn’t think people were going to take so much trouble to get it right. I didn’t think that so much creativity would go into it. I’m just overwhelmed by the whole thing. I’ve got an open invitation to come [to the set] every day. Regrettably, I can’t make it every day but that would be kind of fun.”

On the Hogfather TV adaptation: “I want to see the whole movie. I want everyone else to see it too.”

Quotes from ‘Real-life fantasy’

–interview with AdelaideNow, March 2007

“Discworld has its roots in all my reading about world mythology.”

“If you can accept the fact that the trolls and dwarfs and fairies and all the other creatures of mythology are actually real and are, along with the people, in a sort of Dickens’ London, all grubbing away trying to make a dollar, then you can understand Discworld.”

“While it sounds like a huge heap of undirected fantasy, you can do so many things with it … you can look at race relations, but because it’s between trolls and dwarfs you can have that bit of distance - it draws the sting. However, the logic has to work.”

“None of that, ‘Ho, landlord, a pint of your finest ale!’ People who don’t read fantasy think that’s what it is all about. I was most offended when an American writer asked me if fantasy writing was all about lords and ladies dancing on the lawn to Greensleeves. I shouldn’t think Cohen the Barbarian would like that too much.”

“People have this idea that the fans are totally uncritical. [But] there is always a keen discussion between myself and the fans about what I’m doing and why. People getting deeply involved with the history of fictional characters is a very human phenomenon but not everyone gets that involved. All fans are readers but not all readers are fans.”

“There is a tradition in the science fiction and fantasy genre of ‘paying forward.’ At the first convention I attended in my youth was Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock and a dozen names I thought of as gods. They signed books for me and let me into their conversations, even if they thought of me a bothersome little tit. You can never pay back something like that but you can pay your way forward by making your own contribution.”

I’ve been coming [to Australia] since the early ’80s for book signings and holidays, and the one thing it’s taken me a while to get used to is Australian names. The moment I thought I might really like Australia, however, was on my very first tour. I was doing a book signing and there was a lady in the queue wearing a sari and she had a bindi on her forehead and everything and I thought, ‘Oh dear, this is going to be a complicated name’. She slammed the book down for me to sign and says in a broad Australian accent, ‘G’day! My name’s Janine!’ It was at that point that I thought it might just be possible that Australia is the last best hope of mankind.”