Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“However, there is no question that a lot went on during Terry’s life that I was in a unique position to witness and be involved with – ‘all of the little things and all of the much bigger things’, to quote Terry’s letter – and the plan is that this will be very much that kind of book.”

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“Terry often talked about ‘doing’ his autobiography. In the years before he was ill, he talked about it almost exclusively to dismiss the idea.”

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“It was a lifelong position of Terry’s that schools would be far better places if they took special care to look out for and nurture the twits and the dreamers.”

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“William Pratchett’s last words on this earth were an anguished cry of, ‘I haven’t had my custard yet.’”

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“‘The newspaper owned me,’ Terry would say. ‘My life was not my own and it was accelerating very quickly.’”

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“I realized what troubled me about traditional news journalism,’ Terry wrote. ‘There was hardly any time to get to the truth that lay behind the facts.”

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“Your reward for doing something good,’ Terry has taken to saying, ‘is to do something else good.”

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“Terry didn’t really do deference around famous people. I was once in a position, in Dublin, to introduce him to Bono from U2, explaining, as I did so, that Bono owned the hotel we were standing in. ‘Ah, good,’ Terry said to Bono. ‘Can you get me a milkshake?’ Which he did.”

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“In as much as these occasions can ever ‘go well’, it went well. Indeed, I can think of no greater accolade for the funeral of Terry Pratchett than the one Rhianna came out with: ‘Had it been for someone else, and Dad had been attending, he’d have wanted one just like it.’”

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“So, yes, that’s our consolation. Terry is still alive, and somewhere all of us can always find him when we need to: in those millions of words in those many, many books.”

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