Quotes by J. K. Rowling

“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.”

“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...”

“Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.”

“I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.”

“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.”

“Death is just life's next big adventure.”

“If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

“Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”

“Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.”

“I think you're working and learning until you die.”

“I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.”

“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 capaci...”

“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.”

“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 yours...”

“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...”

“The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.”

“I received free health care.”

“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.”

“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.”

“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 ...”