Jasper Fforde

“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.”

“Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.”

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

“There are a lot of idiots in this country, and they deserve representation as much as the next man.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 Gogh, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.”

“He was, after all, the ultimate rebel -- it takes a lot of cojones to stand up to Zeus.”

“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.”

“Humpty had always sat on walls, it was his way.”

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

“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.”

“There's something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet says...it's payback time!”

“Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas.”

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

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

“To each our own Hamlet.”

“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.”

“I have the death sentence in seven genres.”

“Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.”

“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.”

“I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time. ”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth. ”

“If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, I must be dafter than I look.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Apart from the faint odor of ink that pervaded the scene, it might have been real.”

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

“Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable. ”

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

“Don't ever call me mad, Mycroft. I'm not mad. I'm just ... well, differently moraled, that's all.”

“Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.”

“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.”

“Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence.”

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

“Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.”

“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 they do for the writer - perhaps more.”

“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.”

“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.”