Terry Pratchett Quotes

In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.

What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?

I eat the same way Doc Brown fuels the DeLorean at the end of Back to the Future.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, time travel's a nightmare. Don't go down that path.

In Einstein's equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is that it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.

In a great many stories that deal with time travel, there's usually somebody who knows how time travel works. They lay out the rules.

The one thing humans can't control is time, but what if one has the power to do so is the core theme of '24.'

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

Memories contain hidden editorials on current events.

The past is never where you think you left it.

I'm unstuck in time. Also, I juggle like mad and have made myself efficient.

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

Kiss me in a way I'll never forget. Kiss me in a way that will stay with me until see you again

It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

In science fiction a fantastic event or development is considered rationally.

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.