J. K. Rowling

Working hard is important. But there is something that matters even more: believing in yourself.

We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.

I would always want printed books.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Is 'fat' really the worst thing a human being can be? Is 'fat' worse than 'vindictive', 'jealous', 'shallow', 'vain', 'boring' or 'cruel'? Not to me.

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

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?

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

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

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

I really don't believe in magic.

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

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.

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.

The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.

I just hate meetings.

There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other.

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

I think I've really exhausted the magical. It was a lot of fun, but I've put it behind me for the time being.

Death is just life's next big adventure.

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.

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

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'm pro Union.

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.

I received free health care.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals and be where they are for very different diverse reasons again seems to escape some people.

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.

I feel 80% of my life is completely normal.

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

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

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

The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.

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

I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity.

I've never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.

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.

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

Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

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.

When I was in my teens I had issues with OCD.

What's coming will come and we'll just have to meet it when it does.

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

I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.

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

'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

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 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 that I've had a very strange life.

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

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

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

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

Death obsesses me yes it does. I can't really understand why it doesn't obsess everyone - I think it does really I'm just a little more out about it.

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 love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

There's no formula.

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

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.

But I was the most unashamed lone parent you were ever going to meet.

I'm a writer and I will write what I want to write.

I've laid my friends bare.

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

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.

Of all the subjects on this planet I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most.

I am the freest author in the world.

I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form.

I loved writing for kids I loved talking to children about what I'd written I don't want to leave that behind.

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

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

I'm not a natural joiner.

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

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

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

It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might has well not have lived at all in which case you have failed by default.

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

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 always felt an outsider.

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

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

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

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 felt I had to solve everyone's problems.

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

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

I don't think about who the audience is for my books.

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

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

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.

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.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

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

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