J. K. Rowling Quotes

I’m opposed to fundamentalism in any form.

I don’t need to publish to make a living.

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.

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.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

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.

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.

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.

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 will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

I think that I’ve had a very strange life.

If ever I expected to come face to face with an angry Christian fundamentalist, it wasn’t in FAO Schwarz.

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.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

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.

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.

If you’re holding out for universal popularity, I’m afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.

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.

I’ve laid my friends bare.

Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.

There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other.

I’ve never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.

I really don’t believe in magic.

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.

I would always want printed books.

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 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.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

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.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

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.

I am the freest author in the world.

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.

You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.

When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

I received free health care.

When I was in my teens I had issues with OCD.

I’m not a natural joiner.

I don’t think I am evangelical in my work.

I knew no one who’d ever been in the public eye.

I’m pro Union.

We do stigmatise teens a lot and see them as scary and alien.

I like to get in among a set of people and get to know them very well.

Some of the furor that surrounded a Harry Potter publication was fun.

I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.

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.

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’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’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ll always write.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

I’m an emotional person.

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’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.

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.

If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.