Jasper Fforde

I'm not sure my books would translate into movies very easily. So rather than have someone do a terrible job, I haven't been willing to sell them.

When you're an author, you're always two people. Jasper the writer is different from Jasper the person at home.

There is a contract between the reader and the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash, and I have to entertain them.

Every book should have a romance.

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

Class clowns become actors.

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

If you give children the freedom to do very little, quite a lot will do very little.

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.

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