Jasper Fforde Quotes

“I am surprised to see you because…you died six years ago!”
“I did?” inquired Mycroft with genuine concern. “Why does no one tell me these things?”
I shrugged, as there was really no good answer to this.

I’d been so convinced of that particular narrative I never for one moment stopped to reappraise the situation.

"Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question."

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

There were the rules we were taught, and there were the rules we did our job by. The two were related, but as distant cousins rather than siblings.

"And nothing can stop it?"
"Nothing I know of," he replied sadly. "The best way to stop this is to not allow it to start—sort of a minimum entry requirement for man-made disasters, really."

For centuries I’ve been worrying about audiences seeing me as a mouthy spoiled brat who can’t make up his mind about anything, but, having seen the real world, I can understand the appeal. My play is popular because my failings are your failings, my indecision the indecision of you all. We all know what has to be done; it’s just that sometimes we don’t know how to get there. Acting without thought doesn’t really help in the long run. I might dither for a while, but at least I make the right decision in the end: I bear my troubles and take arms against them. And thereby lies a message for all mankind, although I’m not exactly sure what it is. Perhaps there’s no message. I don’t really know. Besides, if I don’t dither, there’s no play.

“What’s in Hangar One at the moment?” I asked the driver.
“The Magus.”
“Still?” Even the biggest refit never took more than a week, and John Fowles’s labyrinthine-plotted masterpiece had been in there nearly five.
“It’s taking longer than we thought—they removed all the plot elements for cleaning, and no one can remember how they go back together again.”
“I’m not sure it will make a difference,” I murmured as we pulled up outside Hangar Eight.

Winter isn’t a season – it’s a calling.

"Oh, hullo, Worthing," he said in a cheery manner. "How are things?"
"Outlook stormy with a chance of scattered death moving in randomly from all points of the compass."

Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hardwired at inception.

“Incredibly enough, reality TV has just gotten worse.”
“Is that possible? I asked. “Wasn’t Celebrity Trainee Pathologist the pits?” I thought for a moment. “Actually, Whose Life Support Do We Switch Off? was worse. Or maybe Sell Your Granny. Wow, the choice these days makes it also tricky to decide.
Bowden laughed.
“I’ll agree that Granny lowered the bar for distasteful program makers everywhere, but RTA-TV, never one to shrink from a challenge, has devised Samaritan Kidney Swap. Ten renal-failure patients take turns trying to convince a tissue-typed donor—and the voting viewers—which one should have his spare kidney.”
I groaned. Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment—the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.

Friday nodded and took a deep breath. “Has anyone noticed how short attention spans seem to have cast a certain latitude across the nation?”
“Do I ever,” I replied, rolling my eyes and thinking of the endlessly downward clicking of the Read-O-Meter. “No one’s reading books anymore. They seem to prefer the mind numbing spectacle of easily digested trash TV and celebrity tittle-tattle.”
“Exactly,” said Friday. “The long view has been eroded. We can’t see beyond six months, if that, and short-termism will spell our end.”

The good thing about being in the BookWorld is that we aren’t hampered by anything as awkward as physical laws. The RealWorld must be hideously annoying to do science in.

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.