Good Omens Terry Pratchett Quotes & Sayings

You think wars get started because some duke gets shot, or someone cuts off one's ear, or someone's sited their missiles in the wrong place. It's not like that. That's just well, just reasons, which haven't got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can't stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all. — Terry Pratchett

But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat. — Terry Pratchett

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that. — Neil Gaiman

You see a wile, you thwart. Am I right? — Terry Pratchett

There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises. — Terry Pratchett

Having a baby is the single mos joyous co-experience that two human beings can share, and he wasn't going to miss a second of it.
He got one of the Secret Service men to videotape it for him. — Terry Pratchett

- "Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"
There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and who is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."
The BBC interviews a nuclear spokesperson (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens) — Terry Pratchett

Adam looked at Them. They were his kind of people, too.
You just had to decide who your friends really were. — Terry Pratchett

Good Omens was written by two people who at the time were not at all well known except by the people who already knew them. They weren't even certain it would sell. — Terry Pratchett

It'd be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went round trusting one another. — Terry Pratchett

A skeleton, even a walking one, is at least human; Death of a sort lurks inside every living creature. — Terry Pratchett

I bet you don't have to be Spanish to be the Spanish Inquisition," said Adam. "I bet it's like Scottish eggs or American hamburgers. It just has to look Spanish. We've just got to make it look Spanish. Then everyone would know it's the Spanish Inquisition. — Terry Pratchett

Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain. It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and wind at eighty miles an hour.
That would do it every time. — Terry Pratchett

She managed to come up with the kind of predictions that you can only understand after the thing has happened," said Anathema. "Like 'Do Notte Buye Betamacks.' That was a prediction for 1972. — Terry Pratchett

You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you make it right. — Terry Pratchett

One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either. — Terry Pratchett

Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever. — Terry Pratchett

His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconcious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47. — Terry Pratchett

The International Express man couldn't understand it. I mean, in the old days, and it wasn't that long ago really, there had been an angler every dozen yards along the bank; children had played there; courting couples had come to listen to the splish and gurgle of the river, and to hold hands, and to get all lovey-dovey in the Sussex sunset. He'd done that with Maud, his missus, before they were married. They'd come here to spoon and, on one memorable occasion, fork."
From "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman. — Terry Pratchett

Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea. — Terry Pratchett

I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out. — Terry Pratchett

It is possibly worth mentioning at this point that Mr. Young thought that paparazzi was a kind of Italian linoleum. — Terry Pratchett

He looked up at them, a scruffy Napoleon with his laces trailing, exiled to a rose-trellised Elba. — Terry Pratchett