Terry Pratchett Quotes

I realized that there was something internal that I could gain from pursuing this career as an actor. However, once I got into the business I just really abhorred what this career can drum up inside of a person.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

I was adopted into this incredible home, a loving, positive environment, yet I had this yearning, this kind of darkness that was also inside me.

Having a writer in the family is a curse - for the family. I do feel more or less guilty when I'm writing.

Being away from the game you love so much, it will mess with your mind.

Writing takes too much patience and it takes too much out of you for me to want to attempt it too often.

My family had a lot to do with 'My Infamous Life.' They were the inspiration behind me starting to write. I had an interesting family life dating way back, and they did a lot in their lifetime.

I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.

For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do--out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation--look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage

I want to live but I want to die. What do I do?

...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.

Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill were laughing.

That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within

Inside it drives me crazy, my insecurities could eat me alive.

...All I want to talk about is the oncoming apocalypse in my brain.

I certainly do not adore the writer's discipline. I have lost lovers, endangered friendships, and blundered into eccentricity, impelled by a concentration which usually is to be found only in the minds of people about to be executed in the next half hour.

Writing is a refuge from unhappiness, but has its own sorrows.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

I'm unhappy as Dylan Thomas was, because I'm not, but I've had my brushes with sadness.