Quotes from Jasper Fforde

Well, you're AWOL at best and a cheese smuggler at worst. So we've concocted a cover story of such bizarre complexity and outrageous daring that it can only be true. Here it is: in a parallel universe ruled entirely by lobsters, you—

The color painted within the Green Room was known as sweetdream and would render you unconscious in twelve minutes and dead in sixteen, but during those twelve minutes every synapse in your brain would fire in a sparkling fountain of pleasure. The cries from the Green Room were never of pain or fear. They were of ecstasy.

That's a start," she said. "I'd also like you to review the rules regarding spine bending and turning over the corners of pages. If we let simple things like that slide without punishment, we could open the floodgates to poor reading etiquette and a downward spiral to the collapse of civilization.

The four opposing forces in any novel are atmosphere, plot, character and pace. But they don't have to be in equilibrium. You can have a book without any plot or pace at all, but it has to make up for it in character and a bit of atmosphere—like The Old Man and the Sea. Most thrillers are plot and pace and nothing else, such as Where Eagles Dare. But it doesn't matter; each to a reader's own—

When were our brows bound?" yelled the audience. "Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths," continued Richard, ignoring them completely.

solve all our energy problems by inducing power from the sun's magnetic field via a sixty-thousand-mile tether being towed behind a space station anchored gravitationally at Lagrange One.

Although Outlander authors kill, maim, disfigure and eviscerate bookpeople on a regular basis, no author has ever been held to account, although lawyers are working on a test case to deal with serial offenders. The mechanism for transfictional jurisdiction has yet to be finalized, but when it is, some authors may have cause to regret their worst excesses.

According to naturalists, the dragon belonged to the animal kingdom for sure, almost definitely to the vertebrates, and was as likely as not a reptile. Other

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

death was just a natural part of the cycle of renewal, and that life should be seen not as a two-hundred-hard hurdle with a tape to reach before anyone else, but more like a relay race without end, and only one team.

The only time we get to fight the powers of darkness is during one of the kingdom's frequent power cuts

All of us are somewhat clairvoyant; any future you can dream up, no matter how bizarre, retains the faint possibility of coming true. Kevin's skill was of dreaming up future events that were not just possible, but likely. He once said, Being a clairvoyant is ten percent guesswork and ninety percent probability mathematics.

Whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls fiction! . . . Metaphor should be controlled. A glut on the market would make fiction overtly highbrow, painfully ambiguous, and potentially unreadable.

Okay, this is the wisdom: First, time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.

Humans are more or less identical except for a few peculiar habits generally delineated by geographic circumstances and historical precedent. But essentially they're all the same and reading from the same rule book.

Goodness me, no,' he replied with perhaps not quite the tone of veracity in his voice he'd hoped for, 'you can leave whenever you want.

They continue to eat porridge and take long walks in the forest.

No, but by that reasoning,' she said slowly, 'anyone who I've never met in the flesh might actually be me.

Simply put: the easiest and most likely explanation, however mundane, is probably correct.

6.6.19.61.247: Vulgar mispronunciations of everyday words will not be tolerated.

Rotten luck," said Falstaff as I walked past. "There were the remains of a fine woman about Havisham.

If you want your fridge freezer and your car, a nice house, and asphalt on the roads, and a health service, then thank the weapons business. Thank the war economy that drives us to this and thank [a major corporation]. [War] is good, good for England, and especially good for the economy. You deride the weapons business, but without it we would be a 10th rate country struggling to maintain a standard of living anywhere anywhere near that of our european neighbors.

Quark, said the Quarkbeast.

at least this way I never get to be a nightwalker, lumbering around the Winter, eating beetles and curtains and people and stuff