Top 200 Jasper Fforde Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon.”

— Jasper Fforde

52. “Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.”

— Jasper Fforde

53. “Good evening,” said the barman. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” “Because Poe wrote on both?”

— Jasper Fforde

54. “Marriage, like spinach and opera, was something I had never thought I would like.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

56. “Dragons, like four o’clock tea, crumpets, marmalade, and zip-up cardigans, are a peculiarity to the Ununited Kingdoms. They are fierce, fire-breathing creatures of great intelligence, dignity, and sensitivity who could and did converse on matters of great importance. But for all their intelligence, wit, and social graces, dragons still had one habit that made them impossible to ignore.” “And that is?” “They liked to eat people.”

— Jasper Fforde

57. “Personally I have a great deal of fun doing it, which is an inspiration in itself really. It really allows me to daydream, as in “schooldream” which is daydreaming with ink and get paid for it which is something I don’t say to schools when I go in and talk to them.”

— Jasper Fforde

Featured in: Fun Quotes

58. “You’re a liability and a wild card and trouble seems to follow you like a homesick spaniel.”

— Jasper Fforde

59. “To each our own Hamlet.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

61. “Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought – and more reading.”

— Jasper Fforde

Featured in: Reading Quotes

62. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

63. “You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.”

— Jasper Fforde

64. “Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corrpution and error hardwired at inception.”

— Jasper Fforde

65. “Goodness is weakness, pleasantness is poisonous, serenity is mediocrity and kindness is for losers. The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts – and let’s face it, I am considered something of an expert in this field – is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by almost anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good –.”

— Jasper Fforde

66. “Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one.”

— Jasper Fforde

67. “Don’t underestimate mediocrity... Lasting happiness, I’ve found, only really favors the unadventurous.”

— Jasper Fforde

68. “I collect ex-boyfriends – and more than five, at last count.”

— Jasper Fforde

69. “Humans have a very clear idea about how to behave, and on many occasions actually do. But it’s sometimes disheartening that correct action is drowned out by endless chitter-chatter, designed not to find a way forward but to justify petty jealousies and illogically held prejudices.”

— Jasper Fforde

70. “If you look into someone else’s dreams, all you ever find are nightmares.”

— Jasper Fforde

71. “Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.”

— Jasper Fforde

72. “If a shred of integrity fell into your soul, it would die a very lonely death.”

— Jasper Fforde

73. “The Kingdom of Hereford was unique in the Ununited Kingdoms for having driving tests based on maturity, not age, much to the chagrin of a lot of males, some of whom were still failing to make the grade at thirty-two.”

— Jasper Fforde

74. “Much that we had appreciated about one another had been left unsaid. In humor, in life and in love, we had understood.”

— Jasper Fforde

75. “I had never come across a talking cat before, but good manners, as my father used to say, cost nothing.”

— Jasper Fforde

76. “Rabbits never drove fast. They like to enjoy the view, didn’t much care for speed and besides, it was wasteful of fuel. If you want to get somewhere a long way away, just leave early. Days, if that’s required. Or, as Samuel C. Rabbit had it: ‘nhffnfhfiifhfnnffhrhrfhrf’ or ’to travel joyously is better than to arrive.”

— Jasper Fforde

77. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

79. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

80. “Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn”t what it used to be?”

— Jasper Fforde

81. “I also read about Heathcliff’s unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights.”

— Jasper Fforde

82. “They’d never get here in time. It’s easy. A lobotomized monkey could do it.” “And where are we going to find a lobotomized monkey at this time of night?”

— Jasper Fforde

83. “The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more.”

— Jasper Fforde

84. “Those that can be troubled to muse upon the meaning of life are generally disappointed when they figure it out.”

— Jasper Fforde

85. “I was on HPD – Heathcliff Protection Duty – in Wuthering Heights for two years, and believe me, the ProCaths tried everything. I personally saved him from assassination eight times.”

— Jasper Fforde

86. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

87. “The safest course was actually the simplest-do nothing at all and hope everything turned out for the best. It wasn’t a great plan, but it had the benefits of simplicity and a long tradition.”

— Jasper Fforde

88. “Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m thening or nowing.”

— Jasper Fforde

89. “Writing needs to be practiced; there is a limit to how much can be gleaned from a teacher or a manual. The true essence of writing is out there, in the world, and inside, within yourself. To write, you have to give.”

— Jasper Fforde

90. “It’s important to collect evidence,’ she said, ’even if disproved. That’s how science works. Being proved wrong and then advancing. If I’m proved wrong a lot, I must be making headway, right?”

— Jasper Fforde

91. “Shame is the gateway emotion to increased self-criticism, which leads to realisation, an apology, outrage and eventually meaningful action. We’re not holding our breaths that any appreciable members can be arsed to make the journey along that difficult chain of emotional honesty – many good people get past realisation, only to then get horribly stuck at apology – but we live in hope.”

— Jasper Fforde

92. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

93. “Love isn’t sensible, Red. I think that’s the point.”

— Jasper Fforde

94. “Of all the Winter Service Industries, the Winter Consul was the most dangerous. Few who joined expected to last out the decade, yet recruitment was never much of a problem. You didn’t find the job, they said, it found you. No-one ever who entered the Winter voluntarily wasn’t trying to leave something behind.”

— Jasper Fforde

95. “Staying awake in the winter requires considerable pantry, a lot of luck, warm clothes, and several dozen good books.”

— Jasper Fforde

96. “How many people want to read about three disreputable pigs and a dopey wolf with a disposition towards house demolition?”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

98. “After all, color in itself has no color – it’s simply a construction of the mind: a sensation, like the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly and the smell of honeysuckle.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

100. “Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.”

— Jasper Fforde