Jasper Fforde Quotes - Page 5

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

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

A good butler should save his employer's life at least once a day.

So my humor, I'd say, comes from a mixture of lowbrow comedy shows and highbrow theater. It's an interesting mix.

"Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question."

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

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

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.

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.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm thening or nowing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

We're in a psuedoscientific technobabble.

That's the thing about destiny: It can't be predicted, and it's usually pretty odd.

Do I have to talk to insane people?" "You're a librarian now. I'm afraid it's mandatory.

If it's a chimera alert, we just follows the screams.

You nearly killed eight people!" I managed to gasp out loud. "My count was closer to twelve," returned Havisham as she opened the door. "And anyhow, you can't nearly kill someone. Either they are dead or they are not.

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.

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.

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'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.