In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In 'The Colour of Magic' most of the city is set alight. It's a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.'

I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

I do kabbalistic meditation. It's not unlike time travel; it can change the past and not just the future. You can look at what was lost and go beyond the grief of what was lost.

Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.

Franklin was the best known of the Founding Fathers. His death could not go without some sort of official notice. The House of Representatives, after listening to a brief tribute by James Madison, voted to wear badges of mourning for two months and then got on with business.

They were afraid, never having learned what I taught myself: Defeat the fear of death and welcome the death of fear.