Explore Quotes by J. K. Rowling

He put his foot on one pedal, scooted a few yards and swung his other leg over the saddle. He soared left into the vertiginously sloping hillside road and sped, without touching his brakes ... The hedgerows and sky blurred; he imagined himself in a velodrome as the wind whipped his hair clean...

I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I've laid my friends bare.

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.

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

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