Jasper Fforde
94 quotes
Biography
Jasper Fforde is an English novelist whose first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001. He is known mainly for his Thursday Next novels, but has also published two books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series, two in the Shades of Grey series and four in The Last Dragonslayer series.
"If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution."
"Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books."
"Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."
"Don't ever call me mad, Mycroft. I'm not mad. I'm just ... well, differently moraled, that's all."
"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."
"Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse."
"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."
"If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong."
"Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one."
"Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse 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."
"So my humor, I'd say, comes from a mixture of lowbrow comedy shows and highbrow theater. It's an interesting mix."
"Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence."
"Dead. Never been that before. Not even once."
"I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!"
"Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas."
"Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth."
"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert."
"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."
"I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you."
"Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable."
"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."
"the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor."
"I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years,"she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade."
"Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question."
"Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing."