Terry Pratchett: 50 Best Quotes. 

Terry Pratchett, whose science-fantasy Discworld novels are some of the best-selling works in English fiction around the world, died on March 12, 2015, aged 66 after a long battle with Alzheimer\'s disease. Pratchett sold more than 85 million books worldwide and was full of wit and wisdom. His final book The Shepherd’s Crown, completed last year, is published on August 27 2015 (read our review). Here are 50 of his greatest quotations, chosen by Culture Editor Martin Chilton.

1 Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one

2 A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores

3 Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it

4 An education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on

5 The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head

6 Give a man a fire and he\'s warm for the day. But set fire to him and he\'s warm for the rest of his life

7 Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time

8 In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods. They have not forgotten this

9 The space between the young readers eyeballs and the printed page is a holy place and officialdom should trample all over it at their peril

10 "Educational" refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger

11 Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page

Terry Pratchett died on March 12 2015 aged 66

12 I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce

13 I didn\'t go to university. Didn\'t even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did

14 It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it\'s called Life

15 Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages

16 The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it

17 Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind

18 Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces

19 The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp

20 Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people 

21 It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you\'re attempting can\'t be done

22 Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom

23 Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying \'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH\', the paint wouldn\'t even have time to dry

24 Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom

25 Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: \'Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?\'

26 The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues. —from Moving Pictures

27 It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing it

28 People don\'t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it

29 I’d rather be a rising ape than a falling angel

30 If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life

31 Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can

32 The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it

33 It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done

34 There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this

35 The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks

36 Here’s some advice boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That\'s why they’re called revolutions

37 If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story

38 Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things

39 Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out

40 I\'m not writing \'The A-Team\' - if there\'s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal 

His final book The Shepherd’s Crown, completed last year, is published on August 27 2015

41 Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don\'t find out til too late that he\'s been playing with two queens all along

42 Pets are always a help in times of stress. And in times of starvation, too, of course

43 Captain Quirke was not actually a bad man; he didn’t have the imagination; but he dealt more in the generalised low-grade unpleasantness which slightly tarnishes the soul of all who come into contact with it – rather like British Rail

45 The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it

46 They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it\'s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance

48 It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases - one was Alzheimer\'s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer\'s

The best young adult (YA) books of 2016

Gallery: Can you guess what noises these objects make?

John Irving, author of The Cider House Rules: 'My novels are horror stories'

Henning Mankell: 'death always makes a mess of everything'

Author Sara Wheeler remembers her first trip to the South Pole

Women I've Undressed by Orry-Kelly, review: 'Old Hollywood heaven'

The truth about Book Clubs (Thackeray? Pass the Chardonnay)

This Is London by Ben Judah, review: 'astonishing and valuable'

Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson, review: 'Shakespeare reverse-engineered'

Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists by David Aaronovitch, review: 'gripping'

The Wondercrump World of Roald Dahl: inside the dazzling new exhibition

The book most people have lied about reading – and it's not War and Peace

Gallery: 80 great quotes about love and romance: from Adam and Eve to chemsex

Julian Clary on longlist for 2016 Branford Boase Award

Intizar Hussain, Pakistan's 'greatest fiction writer', dies at 92

Gallery: 30 great quotes about Ireland and the Irish

Unseen Joe Orton story The Visa Affair turned into radio play