Top 200 Jasper Fforde Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Religion isn’t the cause of wars, it’s the excuse.”

— Jasper Fforde

2. “Defiance through compliance.”

— Jasper Fforde

3. “Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.”

— Jasper Fforde

4. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

5. “Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.”

— Jasper Fforde

6. “Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.”

— Jasper Fforde

7. “If only life were that simple; if one could jump to the good parts and flick through the bad –.”

— Jasper Fforde

8. “Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?”

— Jasper Fforde

9. “Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.”

— Jasper Fforde

10. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

11. “Clarke’s Second Law of Egodynamics: “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”

— Jasper Fforde

12. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

13. “If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher.”

— Jasper Fforde

14. “Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition.”

— Jasper Fforde

15. “Love and magic are like oil and water – they just don’t mix.”

— Jasper Fforde

16. “Sometimes choice is a luxury that fate does not afford us.”

— Jasper Fforde

17. “Mr. McGregor’s a nasty piece of work, isn’t he? Quite the Darth Vader of children’s literature.”

— Jasper Fforde

18. “The Goliath Corporation was to altruism what Genghis Khan was to soft furnishings.”

— Jasper Fforde

19. “There are a lot of idiots in this country, and they deserve representation as much as the next man.”

— Jasper Fforde

20. “Take no heed of her,” explained Jones apologetically. “She reads a lot of books.”

— Jasper Fforde

21. “Apart from the faint odor of ink that pervaded the scene, it might have been real.”

— Jasper Fforde

22. “Quarkbeasts, for all their fearsome looks, are obedient to a fault. They are nine-tenths velociraptor and kitchen blender and one-tenth Labrador. It was the Labrador tenth that I valued most.”

— Jasper Fforde

23. “Without a yardstick sometimes the high points can be taken for granted.”

— Jasper Fforde

24. “Because there’s someone else here in East Carmin. Someone hopelessly unsuitable. It’s all a really bad idea and will lead to trouble of the worst sort. But no matter what, every minute in her presence makes my life a minute more complete.”

— Jasper Fforde

25. “Librarying is a harder profession than the public realizes, he said. People think it’s all rubber stamps, knowing that Dewey 521 is celestial mechanics and saying ‘Try looking under fiction’ sixty eight times a day.”

— Jasper Fforde

26. “The fun one can have writing books about books is limitless, to be honest.”

— Jasper Fforde

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27. “Humpty had always sat on walls, it was his way.”

— Jasper Fforde

28. “Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment – the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

30. “We were developing a machine that used egg white, heat and sugar to synthesize methanol when a power surge caused an implosion. Owens was meringued. By the time we chipped him out the poor chap had expired.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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32. “I can hardly contain my indifference.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

34. “There is no problem on earth that can’t be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.”

— Jasper Fforde

35. “We all make mistakes at some time in our lives, some more than others. It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

37. “Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail.”

— Jasper Fforde

38. “Palindrome as well. My sister’s name is Hannah. Father liked word games. He was fourteen times World Scrabble Champion. When he died, we buried him at Queenzieburn to make use of the triple word score.”

— Jasper Fforde

39. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

40. “The cucumber and the tomato are both fruit; the avocado is a nut. To assist with the dietary requirements of vegetarians, on the first Tuesday of the month a chicken is officially a vegetable.”

— Jasper Fforde

41. “Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse.”

— Jasper Fforde

42. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

43. “He was, after all, the ultimate rebel – it takes a lot of cojones to stand up to Zeus.”

— Jasper Fforde

44. “Male guilt avoidance syndrome,′ explained my father. ‘It’s a recognised medical condition by 2054.”

— Jasper Fforde

45. “Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then – and this is the important bit – do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies.”

— Jasper Fforde

46. “The actor in with them was Graham Huxtable. He was putting on a felonious one-man performance of Twelfth Night. Persistent offender. He’ll be fined and bound over. His Malvolio is truly frightful.”

— Jasper Fforde

47. “People don’t change just because you know more about them.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

49. “I got Oedipus off the incest charge – technicality, of course – he didn’t know it was his mother at the time.”

— Jasper Fforde

50. “Almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon.”

— Jasper Fforde