J. K. Rowling

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

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

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

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

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

Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most.

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

I feel 80% of my life is completely normal.

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.

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.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

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

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

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

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

I am the freest author in the world.

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

I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity.

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.

I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form.

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

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

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

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.

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

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

I'm not a natural joiner.

I always felt an outsider.

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

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 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.

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'm not anti-middle-class in the slightest. Look at me! I am very pro people putting time and money and effort into trying to improve the world.

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.

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.

Whatever the reviewers feel about 'The Casual Vacancy', it is what I wanted it to be, and you can't say fairer than that as a writer.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I received free health care.

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?

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

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

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