Terry Pratchett

That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next.

What he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

The only reason for walking into the jaws of Death is so's you can steal his gold teeth.

'You know, I never imagined there were he-dryads. Not even in an oak tree.'

'We've strayed into a zone with a high magical index,' he said. 'Don't ask me how. Once upon a time a really powerful magic field must have been generated here, and we're feeling the after-effects.'

Ripples of paradox spread out across the sea of causality.

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.

'It is forbidden to fight on the Killing Ground,' he said, and paused while he considered the sense of this. 'You know what I mean, anyway...'

'[...] on the disc, the Gods are not so much worshipped as blamed.'

What heroes like best is themselves.

I've seen excitement, and I've seen boredom. And boredom was best.

It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.