“It was said that [Vetinari] would tolerate absolutely anything apart from anything that threatened the city*... [Footnote] And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh's crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.”
“If you were the wall, what would you rather be? Dreary and dull, or alive with paint?""Walls can't think!""That doesn't stop them from caring.”
“Papa would say a word and the girl would have to spell it aloud and then paint it on the wall, as long as she got it right. After a month, the wall was recoated. A fresh cement page.”
“Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.”
“Marcovaldo learned to pile the snow into a compact little wall. If he went on making little walls like that, he could build some street for himself alone; only he would know where these streets led, and everybody else would be lost there. He would remake the city, pile up mountains high as houses, which no one would be able to tell from real houses. But perhaps by now all the houses had turned to snow, inside and out, a whole city of snow and with monuments and spires and trees, a city could be unmade by shovel and remade in a different way.”
“Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.”