The wand chooses the wizard.
What will come, will come; you just have to be there to meet it.
I am not trying to influence anyone into black magic. That is the very last thing I'd want to do.
The best way to get children excited about reading is to read to them from the beginning of their lives.
Seven years after becoming a lone parent, I feel qualified to look anyone in the eye and say that people bringing up children single-handedly deserve, not condemnation, but congratulation.
I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it.
The idea that we could have a child who escapes from the confines of the adult world and goes somewhere where he has power, both literally and metaphorically, really appealed to me.
I don't feel quite normal if I haven't written for a while. I doubt I will ever again write anything as popular as the "Harry" books, but I can live with that thought quite easily. By the time I stop writing about Harry, I will have lived with him for 13 years, and I know it's going to feel like a bereavement. So I'll probably take some time off to grieve, and then on with the next book!
No, there's no University for Wizards. At the moment I'm only planning to write seven Harry Potter books. I won't say "never," but I have no plans to write an eighth book.
I had the idea of a boy who was a wizard and didn't yet know what he was. I never sat down and wondered, "What shall I write about next?". It just came, fully formed.
Gilderoy Lockhart is also a lot like someone I once knew, but I don't think I'd better elaborate!
I've wanted to be an author as long as I can remember. English was always my favorite subject at school, so why I went on to do a degree in French is anyone's guess.
I loved writing Dumbledore and he is the epitome of goodness.
Whatever job I had, I was always writing like crazy. All I ever liked about offices was being able to type up stories on the computer when no one was looking. I was never paying much attention in meetings because I was usually scribbling bits of my latest stories in the margins of the pad or thinking up names for my characters. This is a problem when you're supposed to be taking minutes of the meeting.
At fourteen, you really do start realising that the world is not a safe and protected place or not always.
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
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 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?
Death is just life's next big adventure.
Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
I really don't believe in magic.
Never be ashamed! There's some who'll hold it against you, but they're not worth bothering with.
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.
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.
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.
