I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don't really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be, and I really like that, too, so it depends. I've always had more than one thing going.
— J. K. Rowling
We're a phenomenally snobby society, and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.
My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.
Whatever the reviewers feel about 'The Casual Vacancy', it is what I wanted it to be, and you can't say fairer than that as a writer.
I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.
When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.
Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.
I pay a lot of tax, and I feel, one of the reasons I stay and pay why I'm not based in Monaco... I think my country helped me.
I like to get in among a set of people and get to know them very well.
I'm pro Union.
The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.
I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.
In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.
'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.
I received free health care.
I've been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don't need to write a book for adults.
I'm not a natural joiner.
If you love something - and there are things that I love - you do want more and more and more of it, but that's not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.
I'm not anti-middle-class in the slightest. Look at me! I am very pro people putting time and money and effort into trying to improve the world.
On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.
I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.
I think I've really exhausted the magical. It was a lot of fun, but I've put it behind me for the time being.
I think that I've had a very strange life.
I would always want printed books.
I do get recognized, but I must say Edinburgh is a fantastic city to live if you're well-known. There is an innate respect for privacy in Edinburgh people, and I also think they're used to seeing me walking around, so I don't think I'm a very big deal.
If you love something - and there are things that I love - you do want more and more and more of it, but that's not the way to produce good work.
I felt I had to solve everyone's problems.
We do stigmatise teens a lot and see them as scary and alien.
Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can't really understand why it doesn't obsess everyone - I think it does really, I'm just a little more out about it.
The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.
When I was in my teens I had issues with OCD.
I think you're working and learning until you die.
I don't need to publish to make a living.
The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.
The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.
I'm an emotional person.
I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.
I don't think about who the audience is for my books.
You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.
There appears to be something to do with vehicles and movement that stimulates my writing.
I remember the first time I heard a teenager say 'LOL.' Just what? But it means 'laugh.' Why don't you just laugh? What are you doing?
Some of the furor that surrounded a Harry Potter publication was fun.
I've laid my friends bare.
I knew no one who'd ever been in the public eye.
I don't think I am evangelical in my work.
I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.
I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?
I am proud of having done what I've done. Very proud.
I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I'd written, I don't want to leave that behind.
I always felt an outsider.
