I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

It’s rule number one, really – beating your teammate.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Nobody likes to fail. I want to succeed in everything I do, which isn’t much. But the things that I’m really passionate about, if I fail at those, if I’m not successful, what do I have?

When people protest and are upset with a movie, it becomes a big hit. They hated Passion of The Christ, it worked out pretty well for the box office. So let’s get that going.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

All art is quite useless.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

Check your ego at the door. The ego can be the great success inhibitor. It can kill opportunities, and it can kill success.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

I’ve accomplished enough with the music that I haven’t had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

Winning – that’s the most important to me. It’s as simple as that.

The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

If you want to reach the top, don’t run over others. Likely, the only way you’ll reach the top is to be carried there by others.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

Successful people are simply those with successful habits.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

A passionate belief in your business and personal objectives can make all the difference between success and failure. If you aren’t proud of what you’re doing, why should anybody else be?

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Big results require big ambitions.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

Luck marches with those who give their very best.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.