Matthew Barnes

“In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane.*

*This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Truth: Stage Adaptation

“One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“There are not many secure hospitals that can boast someone who thought he was Napoleon, but St. Cerebellum’s could field three—not to mention a handful of serial killers whose names inexplicably yet conveniently rhymed with their crimes. Notorious cannibal “Peter the Eater” was incarcerated here, as were “Sasha the Slasher” and “Mr. Browner the Serial Drowner.” But the undisputed king of rhyme-inspired serial murder was Isle of Man resident Maximilian Marx, who went under the uniquely tongue-twisting epithet “Mad Max Marx, the Masked Manxman Axman.” Deirdre Blott tried to top Max’s clear superiority by changing her name so as to become “Nutty Nora Newsome, the Knife-Wielding Weird Widow from Waddersdon,” but no one was impressed, and she was ostracized by the other patients for being such a terrible show-off.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Fourth Bear

“Dedication   This book is dedicated to Sir Terry Pratchett OBE who has stood like a wossname upon the rocky shores of our imaginations – the better to guide us safely into harbour.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer