Jasper Fforde Quotes & Sayings

“My mind wanders terribly. I'm not wholly annoyed by my daydreaming as it has been immense use to me as regards imaginative thought, but it doesn't help when it comes to concentration. And writing needs concentration - lots of it.”

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

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

“Class clowns become actors.”

“I'm not of the opinion that the next logical step for a book is for it to be made into a film.”

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

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

“I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.”

“In the creative industries, there are few things more exciting than a zinger - a thought, idea, line, plot device - anything really, that just totally works in a fundamentally new and fresh way. It's like a uniquely lovely melody or a new taste idea in cooking. Something special, something new, something wonderful. They're also very rare.”

“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.”