Top 200 Jasper Fforde Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “To each our own Hamlet.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

56. “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

57. “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

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

68. “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

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

77. “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

78. “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

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. “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

81. “Troll Wars were like Batman movies: both were repeated at regular intervals, featured expensive hardware, and were broadly predictable.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

83. “The very possibility of death focuses the mind wonderfully.”

— Jasper Fforde

84. “Our notions of self-determination are, on the whole, something of a myth. We are governed almost exclusively by our own peculiar habits, which makes those who rail against them that much more remarkable.”

— 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. “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

87. “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

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

— Jasper Fforde

89. “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

90. “I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does.”

— Jasper Fforde

91. “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

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

94. “A sloppy half-Windsor is the first symptom of serial indolence’ she replied in the patronizing voice that Yellows reserved for Rule-breakers, ’and ignoring the infraction gives the impression that it is acceptable to be inappropriately attired. The next day it might be badly polished shoes, then uncouth language, showing off and impoliteness. Before one knows it, the rot of disharmony would start to dismantle everything that we know and cherish.”

— Jasper Fforde

95. “He’s not as bad as everyone makes out. He might buy venerable old companies and strip their assets, causing numerous layoffs and the odd corporate suicide or two, but that’s business. Inside, he’s a big teddy bear.”

— Jasper Fforde

96. “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

97. “Every book should have a romance.”

— Jasper Fforde

98. “We require only a grenade launcher, six pounds of industrial-strength licorice, two spells of Class VIII complexity, a shipping container, a side of bacon, an automobile, several homing snails, a ladder, and two people to act as bait.”

— Jasper Fforde

99. “For an author just starting out, you’ve got to deliver the goods every year or sooner or people will forget you or you will lose momentum. There is a contract that exists between author and reader.”

— Jasper Fforde

100. “Death and the end of one’s life are two very different things indeed.”

— Jasper Fforde