Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

"She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of life looking like Daniel Radcliffe."

"What is without dispute...is that the readers need [the Book World] just as much as we need them—to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else."

"Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous."

"Inviting a goblin to cross your threshold was a recipe for disaster, and certainly worse than doing the same with a vampire. With the latter all you got was a nasty bite, but the company, the extraordinarily good sex and the funny stories more than made up for it—apparently."

"I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats."

"Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The Book World is as orderly as people in the Real World *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration."

"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'."

"the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor."

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert."