Terry Pratchett Quotes

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

I'm interested in all kinds of art. I draw and paint and don't know how to play the banjo, but I do play the banjo.

My greatest fear is fear. Ooh, meta.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.

Nature not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

All men are somewhat ridiculous and grotesque, just because they are men; and in this respect artists might well be regarded as man multiplied by two. So it is, was, and shall be.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

We've all got darkness inside us. And I've got quite a lot of darkness.

You might find me outside with a can of hair spray, spraying it with the hope that the sun will burn a hole in the Earth. Another part of me hopes people will grow up and evolve and get smarter. That's the paradox of Marilyn Manson.

I'll play a happy character, but most characters are driven by a pain or a fear. They are driven by something deep down, and most people are like that in the sense. And so, that's what interests me.

I will say it is funny that writing a song about not wanting to entertain people is what got me a career in entertainment.

I'm interested in people's darkness - and humor in the darkness.

We will always need to be reminded that we are human. Art gives us that.

Come, swear it, damn thyself, lest, being like one of heaven, the devils themselves should fear to seize thee; therefore be double-damned, swear,--thou art honest.

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.

All art is autobiographical.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.

Making fun of philosophy is really philosophising.

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.

I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have a fantasy. Everybody must have a fantasy.

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.