J. K. Rowling
film producer, writer, novelist, children's writer, screenwriter, author, anti-transgender activist
Read on Wikipedia1965
All Quotes by J. K. Rowling
“I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don't know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.”
“I felt I had to solve everyone's problems.”
“I think you're working and learning until you die.”
“I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.”
“I don't think about who the audience is for my books.”
“I'm an emotional person.”
“Some of the furor that surrounded a Harry Potter publication was fun.”
“When I was in my teens I had issues with OCD.”
“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.”
“I feel 80% of my life is completely normal.”
“The first story I finished was when I was six years old.”
“I don't think I am evangelical in my work.”
“I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity.”
“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 don't need to publish to make a living.”
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
“I've laid my friends bare.”
“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.”
“I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.”
“I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever - was write novels.”
“I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form.”
“You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.”
“I am proud of having done what I've done. Very proud.”
“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.”
“The best of us must sometimes eat our words.”
“There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other.”
“I am the freest author in the world.”
“In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“There appears to be something to do with vehicles and movement that stimulates my writing.”
“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.”
“I think that I've had a very strange life.”
“There was a point where I really felt I had 'penniless divorcee lone parent' tattooed on my head.”
“We do stigmatise teens a lot and see them as scary and alien.”
“I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.”
“I've never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.”
“I would always want printed books.”
“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.”
“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
“But I was the most unashamed lone parent you were ever going to meet.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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 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.”
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”
“I think you're working and learning until you die.”
“If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”
“It is our choices... that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
“You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.”
“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”
“The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.”
“What's coming will come and we'll just have to meet it when it does.”
“Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”
“When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.”
“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.”
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
“I really don't believe in magic.”
“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.”
“Never be ashamed! There's some who'll hold it against you, but they're not worth bothering with.”
“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.”
“You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.”
“I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“Death is just life's next big adventure.”
“In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.”
“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.”
“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 moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”
“I knew no one who'd ever been in the public eye.”
“Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.”
“The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.”
“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.”
“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?”
“I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.”
“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.”
“I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I'd written, I don't want to leave that behind.”
“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.”
“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.”
“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
“I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.”
“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.”
“Would you like me to [kill you] now?" asked Snape, his voice heavy with irony. "Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?”
“The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.”
“Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”
“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.”
“You sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.”
“I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.”
“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.”
“There's no formula.”
“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.”
“Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.”
“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
“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.”
“The wizards represent all that the true "muggle" most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!”
“I received free health care.”
“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 absolutely did not start writing these books to encourage any child into witchcraft. … I'm laughing slightly because to me, the idea is absurd. I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, "Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch." They see it for what it is... It is a fantasy world and they understand that completely.”
“I'm pro Union.”
“I don't believe in magic, either.”
“I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.”
“Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. …\xa0It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It's a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.”
“I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.”
“Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world.”
“I've never set out to teach anyone anything. It's been more of an expression of my views and feelings than sitting down and deciding "What is today's message?" And I do think that, although I never, again, sat down consciously and thought about this, I do think judging, even for my own daughter, that children respond to that than to "thought for the day."”
“I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.”
“If you need to tell your readers something … there are only two characters that you can put it convincingly into their dialogue. One is Hermione, the other is Dumbledore. In both cases you accept, it's plausible that they have, well Dumbledore knows pretty much everything anyway, but that Hermione has read it somewhere. So, she's handy.”
“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.”
“I've given you more than I've given anyone else which I probably shouldn't probably say on — on screen, or they'll kidnap and torture him, and we need him.”
“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.”
“It would be one way to kill off the merchandising.”
“If you're holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.”
“No story lives unless someone wants to listen.”
“Secretly we're all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.”
“The world is full of wonderful things you haven’t seen yet. Don’t ever give up on the chance of seeing them.”
“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.”
“How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad.”
“Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most.”
“Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione.”
“I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.”
“I mean, is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not me.”
“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 don't think I've ever wanted magic more.”
“Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.”
“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 that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”
“'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.”
“One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.”
“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.”
“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.”
“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.”
“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 received free health care.”
“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.”
“I'm not a natural joiner.”
“The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.”
“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 always felt an outsider.”
“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 like to get in among a set of people and get to know them very well.”
“His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.”
“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.”
“I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don't know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.”
“I felt I had to solve everyone's problems.”
“I think you're working and learning until you die.”
“I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.”
“I don't think about who the audience is for my books.”
“I'm an emotional person.”
“Some of the furor that surrounded a Harry Potter publication was fun.”
“When I was in my teens I had issues with OCD.”
“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.”
“I feel 80% of my life is completely normal.”
“The first story I finished was when I was six years old.”
“I don't think I am evangelical in my work.”
“I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity.”
“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 don't need to publish to make a living.”
“I've laid my friends bare.”
“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.”
“I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.”
“I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever - was write novels.”
“I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form.”
“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.”
“You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.”
“I am proud of having done what I've done. Very proud.”
“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.”
“The best of us must sometimes eat our words.”
“There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other.”
“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
“I am the freest author in the world.”
“In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“There appears to be something to do with vehicles and movement that stimulates my writing.”
“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.”
“I think that I've had a very strange life.”
“There was a point where I really felt I had 'penniless divorcee lone parent' tattooed on my head.”
“We do stigmatise teens a lot and see them as scary and alien.”
“I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.”
“I've never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.”
“I would always want printed books.”
“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.”
“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.”
“But I was the most unashamed lone parent you were ever going to meet.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”
“It is our choices... that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”
“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 internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.”
“What's coming will come and we'll just have to meet it when it does.”
“Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”
“When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.”
“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.”
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
“I really don't believe in magic.”
“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.”
“Never be ashamed! There's some who'll hold it against you, but they're not worth bothering with.”
“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.”
“I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.”
“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 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.”
“Death is just life's next big adventure.”
“In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.”
“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.”
“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 moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”
“I knew no one who'd ever been in the public eye.”
“Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.”
“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.”
“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?”
“I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I'd written, I don't want to leave that behind.”
“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.”
“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.”
“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
“I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.”
“There's no formula.”
“His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.”
“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.”
“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
“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.”
“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'm pro Union.”
“I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.”
“Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world.”
“I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If you're holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.”
“Secretly we're all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.”
“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.”
“Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.”
“I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.”
“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.”
“Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.”
“'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.”
“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.”
“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 received free health care.”
“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.”
“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
“I'm not a natural joiner.”
“The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.”
“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 always felt an outsider.”
“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 like to get in among a set of people and get to know them very well.”
“His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.”
“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.”