J. K. Rowling's Quotes

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

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

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.

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

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

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

But I was the most unashamed lone parent you were ever going to meet.

'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.

I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.

I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity.

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

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

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

I feel 80% of my life is completely normal.

I felt I had to solve everyone's problems.

I just hate meetings.

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

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

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

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

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 think you're working and learning until you die.

I would always want printed books.

I'm not a natural joiner.

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

I've laid my friends bare.

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

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

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.

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

In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.

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.

Secretly we're all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.

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

The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.

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

The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.

There appears to be something to do with vehicles and movement that stimulates my writing.

There was a point where I really felt I had 'penniless divorcee lone parent' tattooed on my head.

There's no formula.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might has well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.

Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.

It is our choices... that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

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.

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.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.

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.

Death is just life's next big adventure.

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

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.

The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

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.