Jasper Fforde Quotes

God, I'm glad I'm not me.

For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.

I can't deal with actors! I can't deal with myself. We're neurotic and miserable ... I love doing what I'm doing, but while I'm doing it, I'm miserable.

Needing to have things perfect is the surest way to immobilize yourself with frustration.

I draw hundreds and hundreds of pictures of sort of gnarly looking men, so I don't know what that tells you. People who look like... they're waiting for a sandwich that's never going to come. I don't know what's wrong with me.

Sometimes I don't understand why I'm sitting here.

We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

It is only when I dally with what I am about, look back and aside, instead of keeping my eyes straight forward, that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart.

Indulge in procrastination, and in time yon will come to this, that because a thing ought to be done, therefore you can't do it.

I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I'm afraid I'll stutter.

Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...

Man, I'm sick of doubt.

So here we are, talking about Roman unicycles and alien sandwiches and my sister’s Italian misfortunes, while hanging in between us is: MY EPIC FAILURE TO CARPE. What’s wrong with me?

And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time , there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.

But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.

He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. "Because if I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die--and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.

He asked himself those some questions too many times and felt the fears again that kept him where he was

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

But it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it.

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

I tend to scare myself.

Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it."

Now I'm where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven't won at all. Running for my life and never looking back in case there's someone right behind me shoot me down and say he always knew I'd fall. When the crazy wheel slows down where will I be? Back where I started.