Jasper Fforde Quotes

No one had been more surprised than me by the arrival of the Great Panjandrum when I pulled the emergency handle. For the nonbelievers it was something of a shock, but not any less than for the faithful. She had been so long a figure of speech that seeing her in the flesh was something of a shock. I thought she had seemed quite plain and in her midthirties, but Humpty-Dumpty told me later he had been shaped like an egg. In any event, the marble statue that now stands in the lobby of the Council of Genres depicts the Great Panjandrum as Mr. Price the stonemason saw him—with a leather apron and carrying a mallet and stone chisel.

It wasn’t going to be hard—it was going to be impossible. It wouldn’t deter me. I’d done impossible things several times in the past, and the prospect didn’t scare me as much as it used to.

"How is the book going?" I asked returning to my knitting.
"The self-help stuff?"
"The magnum opus."
Landen looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, "More opus than magnum. I'm trying to figure out whether the lack of progress is writer's block, procrastination, idleness or just plain incompetence."

I don’t care one way or the other if the big A is using you to scratch an itch, but think very carefully of actions, Wonky. They have a dismaying tendency to be followed by consequences, and sometimes quite bad ones.

My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored: they were merely that chance discovery of one pertinent fact from a million or so possible daily interconnections. “Stop a stranger in the street,” he would say, “and delve into each other’s past. Pretty soon an astounding-too-amazing-to-be-chance coincidence will appear.”

The idea that people actually do this because they like it strikes me as double insanity with added insanity.

"You'll forgive me for saying this," said Webastow, looking over his glasses, "but this is the most harebrained piece of unadulterated stupidity that any government has ever undertaken anywhere."
"Thank you very much," replied Ms. Yogert courteously. "I'll make sure your compliments are forwarded to Prime Minister van de Post."

"Why didn't he say so directly?" asked Sprockett, not unreasonably.
"This is Fiction," I explained. "The exigency of drama requires events to be clouded in ambiguity."

A third faction who called them selves “simplists” argued that there was a single fundamental rule the governed all story: if it works, it works.

Tyrants are all the same—shocking temper when they don’t get their own way!

"He said you were very dangerous."
"No more dangerous than anyone else who dares to speak the truth."

"It's simply part of wider research on a neural expansifier that increases the synaptic pathways in the brain. Aside from repairing traumatic damage and reversing the effects of dementia, it can potentially make dumb people smart."
"I'm trying hard, but I'm not sure I can think of a more useful invention."

Books”—Snell smiled—“are a kind of magic.

Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.

"You're crazy!"
"Undoubtedly. But look around you. You followed me in here. Who's crazier? The crazy or the crazy who follows him?"