Quotes from Jasper Fforde

Good evening," said the barman. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" "Because Poe wrote on both?

She used to only play Help Yourself, but now she only plays Delilah. Is that normal? It's not unusual.

Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought--and more reading.

They had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands; the air was heav'y with th'em&.

Journeys up the Metaphoric River are hugely enjoyable and highly recommended. Since every genre is nourished by its heady waters, a paddle steamer can take even the most walk-shy tourists to their chosen destination. As a bonus, there is traditionally at least one murder on board each trip--a consideration to the head steward will ensure that it is not you.

What's with the iMagic name change?' I said without preamble. 'Industrial Magic was a bit of a mouthful,' he explained. 'Besides, putting an iin front of anything makes it more hip and current.

The trip back home was uneventful and over in only twelve words.

being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.

If only life were that simple; if one could jump to the good parts and flick through the bad —

I wasn't particularly worried; running is overrated anyway, and sport only makes you sweaty and smug and wears out the knees.

A Quarkbeast is a small hyena-shaped creature that is covered in leathery scales and often described as: 'One tenth Labrador, six-tenths velociraptor and three-tenths kitchen food blender.

One was our own Mother Fallopia, tall, elegant, austere, and with a habit so black she looked like a nun-shaped hole in the air.

If you even think about asking Harry Potter for an autograph, your day ends right now.

These are the real puzzles that will face humanity. There is, he claims, a single theory that will explain not only why the queue you choose at a supermarket is always the slowest but why trains always leave on time when you are late and leave late when you are on time." "There isn't an answer to those," murmured Madeleine doubtfully. "It just happens." "That's what they used to say about lightning," replied Pandora, "and rainbows.

This is Fiction, and the truth is whatever you make it. You can interpret the situation in any way you want, and all of the scenarios could be real -- and what's more, depending on how you act now, any one of them could become real.

PDR: Persons of Dubious Reality; refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real, from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless; they do what they do because it's what they've always done. And it's our job to stop them.

It was one of those British phrases, along with 'May I help you?', that can be either exceedingly polite or hugely aggressive.

After all, color in itself has no color — it's simply a construction of the mind: a sensation, like the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly and the smell of honeysuckle.

Well, each interpretation of an event, setting or character is unique to each of those who read it because they clothe the author's description with the memory of their own experiences. Every character they read is actually a complex amalgam of people they've met, read or seen before - far more real than it can ever be just from the text on the page. Because every reader's experiences are different, each book is unique for each reader.

If you even *need* a government, added Stig, you are a life-form flawed beyond redemption.

Love and magic are like oil and water--they just don't mix.

Vanity's contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labour and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted into Fiction with an apologetic 'gosh, don't know how that happened'.

On one memorable occasion Vronsky played all the parts in an abridged version of Anna Karenina when the rest of the cast were on strike for more blinis.

Sometimes your destiny takes you to dark places where you'd rather not be, but destiny, as they say, is destiny.