Quotes by J. K. Rowling

Anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.
– J. K. Rowling
Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.
– J. K. Rowling
I really don't believe in magic.
– J. K. Rowling
I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don't know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.
– J. K. Rowling
If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
– J. K. Rowling
If you're holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.
– J. K. Rowling
Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.
– J. K. Rowling
Never be ashamed! There's some who'll hold it against you, but they're not worth bothering with.
– J. K. Rowling
The best of us must sometimes eat our words.
– J. K. Rowling
There is no good or evil: only power and those too weak to seak it.
– J. K. Rowling
To the philosopher, death is but the next great adventure.
– J. K. Rowling
What's coming will come and we'll just have to meet it when it does.
– J. K. Rowling
It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
– J. K. Rowling
The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.
– J. K. Rowling
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
– J. K. Rowling
You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.
– J. K. Rowling
Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
– J. K. Rowling
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
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?
– J. K. Rowling
I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
I think you're working and learning until you die.
– J. K. Rowling
I received free health care.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
– J. K. Rowling
I don't think I am evangelical in my work.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world.
– J. K. Rowling
Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
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.
– J. K. Rowling
'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.
– J. K. Rowling