Top 200 Jasper Fforde Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “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

102. “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

103. “Every book should have a romance.”

— Jasper Fforde

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Jasper Fforde

107. “We’re all something we’re not,′ he said. ‘Every one of us is stuck between the person we want to be and the person we can be. And there doesn’t have to be a why. All things have to do is feel right.”

— Jasper Fforde

108. “By spiritually I merely mean that I feel I have good in my soul and am inclined to follow the correct course of action given a prescribed set of circumstances.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

110. “Punching goblins, replied Sprockett soothingly, while offering short-term relief, has no long-term beneficial value.”

— Jasper Fforde

111. “People who read my books have an open mind when it comes to new, bizarre, interesting and exciting ideas.”

— Jasper Fforde

112. “It took me ten years and seven books to bag an agent – it took me that long to start writing good.”

— Jasper Fforde

113. “2.5.03.02.005: Generally speaking, if you fiddle with something, it will break. Don’t.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

117. “We try to make art perfect because we never manage it in real life.”

— Jasper Fforde

118. “The universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back on the table.”

— Jasper Fforde

119. “A good butler should save his employer’s life at least once a day.”

— Jasper Fforde

120. “Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict.”

— Jasper Fforde

121. “If you even think about asking Harry Potter for an autograph, your day ends right now.”

— Jasper Fforde

122. “Social mores change with time, like fashion – who knows where it might all end up? I especially like the idea that waste, impoliteness and overpopulation become “abominations,” although I’m not sure recycling one’s aunt will ever truly catch on.”

— Jasper Fforde

123. “Tangling with the Goliath Corporation generally left you in one of two places: inside a wooden box with a grieving family outside, or inside a wooden box under six foot of soil with family wondering where you were. The former was if they didn’t hold a grudge.”

— Jasper Fforde

124. “It was one of those British phrases, along with ‘May I help you?’, that can be either exceedingly polite or hugely aggressive.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

126. “I loved him, officer. More than any woman ever loved an egg.”

— Jasper Fforde

127. “The only thing you really get to figure out after a lifetime of study is that there’s more stuff to figure out. Frustrating and enlightening at the same time.”

— Jasper Fforde

128. “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

129. “I’ve got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.”

— Jasper Fforde

130. “Strive for the Long Now.”

— Jasper Fforde

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

— Jasper Fforde

132. “The cleanest souls are the easiest to soil.”

— Jasper Fforde

133. “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

134. “It was loopholery at its very best.”

— Jasper Fforde

135. “Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics; nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed.”

— Jasper Fforde

136. “And we kissed again. It was a warm, indescribably lovely feeling. But it was more than just physical. It was a dialogue between two young people with high ideals and a Big Plan. It was about belonging, secrets, partnership, commitment.”

— Jasper Fforde

137. “If it’s a chimera alert, we just follows the screams.”

— Jasper Fforde

138. “I was glad to see I had only witnessed Dad’s death and not the end of his life, as the two I learned are barely related at all.”

— Jasper Fforde

139. “The government was to raise the duty on cheese to 83 percent, an unpopular move that would doubtless have the more militant citizens picketing cheese shops.”

— Jasper Fforde

140. “I found Jane, too, or perhaps she found me. It doesn’t really matter. We found each other. And although she was Grey and I was Red, we shared a common thirst for justice that transcended Chromatic politics. I loved her, and what’s more, I was beginning to think that she loved me. After all, she did apologize before she pushed me into the leafless expanse below the spread of the yateveo, and she wouldn’t have done that if she’d felt nothing.”

— Jasper Fforde

141. “There is a certain degree of steampunkishness that creeps into my books.”

— Jasper Fforde

142. “And he gave me a smile that looked as though it had come from a hastily-read handbook on cultivating personal charm.”

— Jasper Fforde

143. “I liked him, but since his particular field of interest was Remote Suggestion – the skill of projecting thoughts into people’s heads from a distance – I didn’t know whether I actually liked him or he was just suggesting I like him, which was both creepy and unethical. In fact, the whole Remote Suggestion or “seeding” idea had been banned once it was discovered to be the key ingredient in promoting talent less boy bands, which had until then been something of a mystery.”

— Jasper Fforde

144. “Dead. Never been that before. Not even once.”

— Jasper Fforde

145. “Working with those versed in the Mystical Arts was sometimes like trying to knit with wet spaghetti: just when you thought you’d gotten somewhere, it all came to pieces in your hands.”

— Jasper Fforde

146. “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.”

— Jasper Fforde

147. “That’s the thing about destiny: It can’t be predicted, and it’s usually pretty odd.”

— Jasper Fforde

148. “7. 3. 12. 31. 208: Reckless disrespect of the lightless hours will not be tolerated.”

— Jasper Fforde

149. “I’m always surprised that you all don’t take more interest in other creatures. It’s like living on a street and not knowing your next-door neighbor. If I were human, I’d start investing in a little kindness. When the arthropods rule the planet, all those lobster dishes and crab sticks could well be a cause of some regret.”

— Jasper Fforde

150. “If you want your fridge-freezer and your car and a nice house and asphalt on the roads and a health service, then thank the weapons business. Thank the war economy that drives us to this.”

— Jasper Fforde