top of page
"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes

"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."

"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."

"Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must."

"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."

"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"

"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"

"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."

"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."

"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."

"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"
Explore more quotes by Jasper Fforde

"Believe me, you're going to have to do much worse than this--in the pursuit of freedom, the innocents will suffer--and at your hands."

"Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics, nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed."

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

"But that was what research and development were like. Full of semi-triumphs and perplexing unforeseen consequences like the whole violent hiccuping thing when conjuring up fire - or the propensity for fillings to fall out of bystanders' teeth when attempting to tease a rainstorm out of a cloud."

"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."

"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."

"Vanity's contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labour and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted into Fiction with an apologetic 'gosh, don't know how that happened'."

"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."
bottom of page