Authors Quotes

When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

I always advise children who ask me for tips on being a writer to read as much as they possibly can. Jane Austen gave a young friend the same advice, so I'm in good company there.

I've no idea where ideas come from and I hope I never find out, it would spoil the excitement for me if it turned out I just have a funny little wrinkle on the surface of my brain which makes me think about invisible train platforms.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being Jane Austen, being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous.

Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don't think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it.

I love freakish names and I have always been interested in folk lore and I think it was a logical thing for me to end up writing even though it came so suddenly.

If you need to tell your readers something... there are only two characters that you can put it convincingly into their dialogue. One is Hermione, the other is Dumbledore. In both cases you accept, it's plausible that they have, well Dumbledore knows pretty much everything anyway, but that Hermione has read it somewhere. So, she's handy.

Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, “You’re all a lost generation.” That got around to certain people and we said, Whee! We’re lost. Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don’t forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.

The decisive moment.

‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice.

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

How to win friends and influence people.

Other voices, other rooms.

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.

Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats…these are the facts.