It would have been easy to dislike her intensely, but I actually felt nothing for her at all. - Jasper Fforde

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

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.

Sprockett buzzed briefly to himself. “Does that sort of thing happen out there in the RealWorld, or is it just in books?”
I thought for a moment. Of the untidy chaos I had seen in the RealWorld; of not knowing what was going to happen; of not knowing what, if anything, head relevance. The RealWorld was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. I thought then of the narrative order here in the BookWorld, our resolved plot lines and the observance of natural justice we took for granted.
“Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld hope their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”