Jasper Fforde Quotes

Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

Art to me was a state: it didn't need to be an accomplishment.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago.

When you fall in love with a book, something especially interesting and exciting is happening because of the way language works on us as human beings. And I love language.

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.

The act of reading a story is sacred, and people build images and all that stuff.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.

My writing is a product of how I would interact with things that have happened to me or things that have not happened to me but have happened to somebody else.

I think the two main tools actors have are the imagination of what other people have gone through, to connect with and through research, and there's one's own experience.

With acting, it wouldn't be about money: it would be about taking my life experiences and using them to create art.

The characters I portray are an extension of what I've seen, heard, or read, and so what you see in my films are how I understand life.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

When I write music, I know a lot of artists like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran tend to write from personal experience. I write from personal experience, of course, but I don't limit myself to that.

With any character, you have to put part of yourself into it because we are the soul that brings that character to life.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything's handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven't understood what the director's on about... The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you're reading.

In reading we must become creators.