You’ve got to give the door something?’‘Yes,’ said Dumbledore. ‘Blood, if I am not much mistak
‘Harry Potter’ gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.
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.
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.
Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.
If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.
I think you’re working and learning until you die.
I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.
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 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 truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.
Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.
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.
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.
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’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?