It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

Henry David Thoreau

Every new time will give its law.

Maxim Gorky

India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country.

Anita Desai

We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.

Claud Cockburn

No one ever complains about a speech being too short!

Ira Hayes

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.

Ray Bradbury

The eternal sea of politics is best left to politicians.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Richard Dawkins

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come.

William Shakespeare

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

L. L. Nash

I travel abroad constantly on book promotion and research, and the Internet is invaluable to me for accessing U.K. news in places such as America, which most of the time hasn't heard of England.

Peter James