I think I work much harder on the children's books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I've never been quite certain why this is.
Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'
The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
When you read, I'm sure you don't realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don't do that.
I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
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 I would like to go into modelling. Of course, I don't know how to do it, and wouldn't be any good at it if I did, so I'm going to employ someone to walk the catwalks on my behalf. It would still be me, of course.
You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. 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.
Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.
It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
I'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.
I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, 'If wet, in the library.' Who could say that this is bad?
In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.
By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.
You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.
I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.
I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.