If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.
Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.
I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for me. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.
‘Harry Potter’ gave me back self-respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.
I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.
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.
It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.
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 you but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.
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.
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.
Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.
The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.
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.
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.
Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.
The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.
And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for a while is just bliss.
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 will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.
Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.
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.
