Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
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...
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
I don't think I am evangelical in my work.
Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.
I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.
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...
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.
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...
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.
There is a room in the Department of Mysteries, that is kept locked at all times. It contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces...
Family is a life jacket in the stormy sea of life.
If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
He'll have that scar forever.
'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.
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 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 w...