I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.
— J. K. Rowling
I don't read 'chick lit,' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.
There was a point where I really felt I had 'penniless divorcee lone parent' tattooed on my head.
I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity.
The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.
I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.
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.
I think you have a moral responsibility when you've been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.
I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.
Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.
Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.
The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.
I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.
I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form.
If ever I expected to come face to face with an angry Christian fundamentalist, it wasn't in FAO Schwarz.
I've never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
I just hate meetings. Though it's true that once you've made a lot of money, people around you might be full of ideas about ways to make lots more money and might be disappointed that you don't want to seize every opportunity to do so.
And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.
In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.
People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don't know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.
Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
There's no formula.
You sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.
The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.
Never be ashamed! There's some who'll hold it against you, but they're not worth bothering with.
With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.
But I was the most unashamed lone parent you were ever going to meet.
It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it's perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.
I am the freest author in the world.
I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.
The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.
No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing.
I feel 80% of my life is completely normal.
Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most.
I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.
However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.
I really don't believe in magic.
What's coming will come and we'll just have to meet it when it does.
The best of us must sometimes eat our words.
