Jasper Fforde

“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.”

“I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!”

“She had large, questioning eyes that seemed to draw me in and a sense of quiet outrage that simmered just beneath the surface. More than anything, within her features, there was a streak of wild quirkiness that made her dazzlingly attractive.”

“But that was what research and development were like. Full of semi-triumphs and perplexing unforeseen consequences like the whole violent hiccuping thing when conjuring up fire - or the propensity for fillings to fall out of bystanders' teeth when attempting to tease a rainstorm out of a cloud.”

“Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas.”

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

“Class clowns become actors.”

“Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence.”

“For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”

“When I was about 10 or 11, I realised that people made movies; until then, I had thought they just happened.”

“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.”

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

“When she turned I could see her face was plain and outwardly unremarkable, yet possessing of a bearing that showed inner strength and resolve. I stared at her intently with a mixture of feelings. I had realised not long ago that I was no beauty, and even at the age of nine had seen how the more attractive children gained favour more easily. But here in that young woman I could see how those principles could be inverted. I felt myself stand more upright and clench my jaw in subconscious mimicry of her pose”

“I have a very varied taste in music. Everything from rap to classical to Latino to Rat Pack to jazz.”

“I work very much on the principle that anything created by mankind has mischief and error hardwired into its inception.”

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

“There is a contract between the reader and the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash, and I have to entertain them.”

“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'.”

“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.”

“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.”