Top 70 J. K. Rowling Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

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

When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

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

I’m opposed to fundamentalism in any form.

I’m not a natural joiner.

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 pay a lot of tax, and I feel, one of the reasons I stay and pay why I’m not based in Monaco… I think my country helped me.

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

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

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

Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

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

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

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

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

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?

I really don’t believe in magic.

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 will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

There’s no formula.

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

We’re a phenomenally snobby society, and it’s such a rich seam. 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.

I always felt an outsider.

Never be ashamed! There’s some who’ll hold it against you, but they’re not worth bothering with.

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

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

I just hate meetings. Though it’s true that once you’ve made a lot of money, people around you might be full of ideas about ways to make lots more money and might be disappointed that you don’t want to seize every opportunity to do so.

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

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

I received free health care.

Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

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

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

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

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

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.

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

I think you’re working and learning until you die.

I think you have a moral responsibility when you’ve been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

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

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even… knowledge, was foolproof.

I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

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.

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

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.

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

I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don’t really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be, and I really like that, too, so it depends. I’ve always had more than one thing going.

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.

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

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.

I feel 80% of my life is completely normal.

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.

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

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

I think that I’ve had a very strange life.