Top 35 Joanne Harris Quotes

I don’t listen to music when I’m writing, but I often do when I’m reworking, editing or when I need to relax.

I was convinced I’d hate Twitter – but I’ve come to like it very much. I use it mostly to keep in touch with friends and colleagues I wish I could see more often – I sometimes feel a little isolated living in Yorkshire, and it’s nice to have the contact.

I think everybody has a secret life.

Before you have children, you mostly think about the world in terms of yourself. And when you become a parent, the focus shifts to somebody else.

Writing books and being paid for it – it’s not like winning the Lottery. You can’t suddenly go, ‘Yippee!’ and start throwing tenners in the air. I’ve done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, ‘Right, that’s me set up for life.’

I’m not fond of cities: the constant activity and swarms of people.

I sublimate different parts of my personality through my characters. Which is worrying, as some of them can be a bit nasty. I’m pleased the stuff on the page isn’t inside me any more.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

I am fascinated by how people eat and what it reveals about them.

We spoke French at home and I didn’t know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.

I think if you are an outsider then you are an outsider always.

If you want to know what’s important to a culture, learn their language.

Some areas of technology really don’t interest me at all, but I welcome anything that makes life easier instead of harder.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on – that’s great, it’s eliciting a response by proxy.

As authors, we all expect criticism from time to time, and we all have our ways of coping with unfriendly reviews.

For me, the magic of Hawaii comes from the stillness, the sea, the stars.

It may be something to do with my having been to a girls’ school, but I’m far more comfortable making male friendships than female ones. My friends tend to be men and their significant others.

If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It’s the ethic my mother brought me up with.

I was a very bad accountant; I didn’t care about money, golf or discovering fraud. After about a year I was sacked; then I went into teacher training.

The great thing about books is that you can end with a question mark.

Of course I didn’t pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

I first saw the island of Noirmoutier when I was two weeks old. I think it’s probably safe to say that I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time; but I grew to love it as year after year I spent holidays there at my grandparents’ cottage.

I’m insatiably curious.

I’m incapable of hiding my feelings when I’m around someone I don’t like.

I had a great grandmother who believed in so many strange superstitions. She used to tell the future from the things that catch on to the hem of your skirt when you’ve been sewing, and different colored threads would mean different things… Of course, all that influenced me quite a lot as a child.

I’m quite an untidy person in a lot of ways. But order makes me happy. I have to have a clear desk and a tidy desktop, with as few visual distractions as possible. I don’t mind sound distractions, but visual ones freak me out.

I tend to write about more than one generation because as a child I had contact with more than one generation; it was normal to be around older people.

I can write absolutely anywhere. All I need is a laptop.

A little tantrum in real life seems so much bigger online.

I am not at all a chocoholic. I would rather eat anchovy toast.

My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete.

I’ve nothing against kids reading anything they please, but I do have a problem with pink books for girls and black books for boys.

I’m phobic about the idea of being constrained.

I don’t tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.

If you can actually get someone to sit on the edge of their seat and feel nervous if there’s a knock at the door, then you’ve done something pretty terrific as a writer.