Jasper Fforde Quotes

"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."

"Do you know what the worst bit about dying is?"
"Tell me, Gran."
"You never get to see how it all turns out."

Money had never been a problem in the Book World. All the details of life were taken care of by something called Narrative Assumption. A reader would assume you had gone shopping, or gone to the toilet, or brushed your hair, so a writer never needed to outline it.

Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.

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.

"I'll be honest," I said, "I have nothing against anyone who believes, but I think it's a dangerous nonsense."

The first four in the series had been less a lighthearted chronicling of my adventures and more of a “Dirty Harry meets Fanny Hill,” but with a good deal more sex and violence.

"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."

"It was a coincidence."
"I don't believe in coincidences."
"Neither do I. That's a coincidence, isn't it?"

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

Whatever. As far as I can see, there is one state of dead and that’s ‘not living.’ Now, do you have anything useful to add to this investigation or not?”

"The stupidity surplus," repeated Landen as he sat down at the kitchen table, "I'm all for responsible government, but storing it up like this is bound to cause problems sooner or later—even by acting sensibly, the government has shown itself to be a bunch of idiots."
"There are a lot of idiots in this country," I replied absently, "and they deserve representation as much as the next man."

"Last season we had the Reduced Shakespeare Company doing 'Highlights of the Mostly Complete History of Condensing Stuff (abridged)'."

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.