"Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"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 (First Among Sequels)

"If real life were a book, it would never find a publisher."
— Jasper Fforde

"Sorry," [Hamlet] said, rubbing his temples. "I don't know what came over me. All of a sudden I had this overwhelming desire to talk for a very long time without actually doing anything."
— Jasper Fforde

"I'm not mad. I'm just...well, differently moralled, that's all."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence. "
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as the do for the writer - perhaps more."
— Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots)

"Dead. Never been that before. Not even once."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"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 (The Big Over Easy)

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

"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 (The Well of Lost Plots)

"Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer."
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!"
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable. "
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth. "
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere."
— Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots)

""You'll like it here; everyone is quite mad.""
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas."
— Jasper Fforde (Something Rotten)

"Good. Item seven. The had had and that that problem. Lady Cavendish, weren’t you working on this?’
Lady Cavendish stood up and gathered her thoughts. ‘Indeed. The uses of had had and that that have to be strictly controlled; they can interrupt the imaginotransference quite dramatically, causing readers to go back over the sentence in confusion, something we try to avoid.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s mostly an unlicensed-usage problem. At the last count David Copperfield alone had had had had sixty three times, all but ten unapproved. Pilgrim’s Progress may also be a problem due to its had had/that that ratio.’
“So what’s the problem in Progress?’
‘That that had that that ten times but had had had had only thrice. Increased had had usage had had to be overlooked, but not if the number exceeds that that that usage.’
‘Hmm,’ said the Bellman, ‘I thought had had had had TGC’s approval for use in Dickens? What’s the problem?’
‘Take the first had had and that that in the book by way of example,’ said Lady Cavendish. ‘You would have thought that that first had had had had good occasion to be seen as had, had you not? Had had had approval but had had had not; equally it is true to say that that that that had had approval but that that other that that had not.’
‘So the problem with that other that that was that…?’
‘That that other-other that that had had approval.’
‘Okay’ said the Bellman, whose head was in danger of falling apart like a chocolate orange, ‘let me get this straight: David Copperfield, unlike Pilgrim’s Progress, had had had, had had had had. Had had had had TGC’s approval?’
There was a very long pause. ‘Right,’ said the Bellman with a sigh, ‘that’s it for the moment. I’ll be giving out assignments in ten minutes. Session’s over –and let’s be careful out there.'"
— Jasper Fforde

"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 (Something Rotten)

"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 (The Big Over Easy)

"I have the death sentence in seven genres."
— Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots)

"Sometimes I don't know whether I'm thening or nowing."
— Jasper Fforde (Something Rotten)

"If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, I must be dafter than I look."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"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 (Something Rotten)

"'…Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently?
'What do you mean, odd?'
'Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.'
"
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"It's simple. If you go to see 'Saturday Night Fever' expecting it to be good, it's a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it's that, too. Thus 'Saturday Night Fever' can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation - even, as in the case of retro-deficit-engineering, the present use of a future technology."

"I think I understand that. Does it work with any John Travolta movie?"

"Only the artistically ambiguous ones such as 'Pulp Fiction' or 'Face/Off.' 'Battlefield Earth' doesn't work, because it's a stinker no matter how much you think you're going to like it, and 'Get Shorty' doesn't work either, because you'd be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notions."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"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 (First Among Sequels)

"True and baseless evil is as rare a the purest good--and we all know how rare that is..."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time. "
— Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots)

"How fishy on the fishiness scale? Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark."

"A whale isn't a fish, Thursday."

"A whale shark is--sort of."

"All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish."

"A crayfish isn't a fish."

"A starfish, then."

"Still not a fish."

"This is a very odd conversation, Thursday."
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"Humpty had always sat on walls, it was his way."
— Jasper Fforde (The Big Over Easy)

"If it's a chimera alert, we just follows the screams. "
— Jasper Fforde (Something Rotten)

"There's something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet says...it's payback time!"
— Jasper Fforde (Something Rotten)

"I'll tell you what love is. It is Unquestioning self humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your heart and soul to the smiter."
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"Who do readers expect to see when they pick up this book? Who has won the Most Troubled Romantic Lead at the BookWorld Awards seventy-seven times in a row? Me. All me."
— Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots)

"He was, after all, the ultimate rebel -- it takes a lot of cojones to stand up to Zeus."
— Jasper Fforde (The Big Over Easy)

"'…Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently?
'What do you mean, odd?'
'Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.' "
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"Apart from the faint odor of ink that pervaded the scene, it might have been real."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"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 (Lost in a Good Book)

"I collect ex-boyfriends -- and more than five, at last count."
— Jasper Fforde (The Big Over Easy)

"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 (The Eyre Affair)

"To each our own Hamlet."
— Jasper Fforde (Something Rotten)

""Ordinary adults don't like children to speak of things that are denied them by their own gray minds.""
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

""How many people want to read about three disreputable pigs and a dopey wolf with a disposition towards house demolition?""
— Jasper Fforde (The Big Over Easy)

""Maybe those sorts of yes-or-no life-and-death decisions are easier to make because they are so black and white. I can cope with them because it's easier. Human emotions, well. . .they're just a fathomless collection of grays and I don't do so well on the midtones.""
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"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 (Something Rotten)