JK Rowling
QuotesJust a few great quotes from Joanne Rowling:
"I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself."
"I think I'd most like to spend a day with Harry. I'd take him out for a meal and apologize for everything I've put him through."
"Always have a vivid imagination, for you never know when you might need it."
"There is a lot of comedy in magic, and magic going wrong, and also it is a dramatic subject"
"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 gave my hero a talent I'd love to have. Who wouldn't want to fly?"
"Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most."
"I had an American journalist say to me, "Is it true you wrote the whole of the first novel on napkins?" I was tempted to say, "On teabags, I used to save them."
"The spells are made up. I have met people who assure me, very seriously, that they are trying to do them, and I can assure them, just as seriously, that they don't work."
"It will be called 'Harry Potter and...' something. Catchy, don't you think? And I think I'll follow the same model for seven." (when asked the title of Book 6)
"I think the Harry books are very moral, but some people just object to witchcraft being mentioned in a children's book. Unfortunately, that means we'll have to lose a lot of classic children's fiction."
"Actually finishing it was the most remarkable feeling I've ever had... (I felt) euphoria, devastated... I was in a hotel room on my own, sobbing my heart out. I downed half a bottle of champagne in one and went home with mascara all over my face."
"I sat and thought for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me."
"I personally never expected to be in the papers. The height of my ambition for these books was, well frankly, to get reviewed. A lot of children's books don't even get reviewed."
"I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter."
"Part of me will be glad when it's (the Harry Potter series) over. Family life will become more normal. (But) I'll be so sad to think I'll never write a Harry-Ron-Hermione sentence again."
"I would never pick up one of my own books to read in the bath."
"I've got a mental amount that I can't spend beyond. I still have a limit to what I think I would be justified in spending on frivolity."
"I was isolated before I got famous, and having fame on top of an already isolating situation didn't help. It was as though I'd lived under a rock for a long time and suddenly someone had lifted it off and was shining a torch onto me."
"My power of concentration is battle-hardened. It's just the way I've always had to write."
"I was trying to subvert the genre. Harry goes off into this magical world, and is it any better than the world he's left?"
"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 don't believe in magic, either."
"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."
"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 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."
"It is important to remember that we all have magic inside us."