Quotes from Jasper Fforde

I still feel threatened by academics, but my books have a lot of academic in-jokes and everybody assumes I went to university and studied English.

I just write books, and I do it without any notion of what I should do or shouldn't do.

Perhaps fantasy offers imaginative escapism more than other genres.

People who read my books have an open mind when it comes to new, bizarre, interesting and exciting ideas.

The industrial age had only just begun; the planet had reached its Best Before date.

Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently? What do you mean, odd?' Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.

Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.

You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was Catch-22 , which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.

Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.

True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good--and we all know how rare that is...

If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream , I must be dafter than I look.

What is there to forgive?. . .Ignore forgive and concentrate on living. Life for you is short; far too short to allow small jealousies to infringe on the happiness which can be yours only for the briefest of times.

Don't let anyone tell you the future is already written. The best any prophet can do is to give you the most likely version of future events. It is up to us to accept the future for what it is, or change it. It is easy to go with the flow; it takes a person of singular courage to go against it.

I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.

Almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon.

Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isnt what it used to be?

Ordinary adults don't like children to speak of things that are denied them by their own gray minds.

Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.

History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.

How fishy on the fishiness scale? Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark. A whale isn't a fish, Thursday. A whale shark is--sort of. All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish. A crayfish isn't a fish. A starfish, then. Still not a fish. This is a very odd conversation, Thursday.

I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.

Fanfiction isn't copying - it's a celebration . One long party, from the first capital letter to the last full stop!

Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.

The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning.