J. K. Rowling Quotes

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

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

Anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.

I'm pro Union.

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

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

Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

I've laid my friends bare.

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

You sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.

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

I always felt an outsider.

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

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

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever - was write novels.

I really don't believe in magic.

I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form.

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

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

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.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.

I am proud of having done what I've done. Very proud.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

There's no formula.

I received free health care.

I don't think about who the audience is for my 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 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 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 love a good Dorothy Leigh Sayers.

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?

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.