J.K. Rowling Quotes

Born 1965

British author of the 'Harry Potter' series, who gave the Harvard commencement address 'The Fringe Benefits of Failure' in 2008.

21 quotesAbout J.K. Rowling on Wikipedia

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all.”

— J.K. Rowling

“It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies; but a great deal more to stand up to your friends.”

— J.K. Rowling

“Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun.”

— J.K. Rowling

“And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

— J.K. Rowling

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.”

— J.K. Rowling

“Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced.”

— J.K. Rowling

“I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters.”

— J.K. Rowling

“Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors.”

— J.K. Rowling

“I've never set out to teach anyone anything.”

— J.K. Rowling

“I do not walk around my house thinking about my legacy.”

— J.K. Rowling

“Hermione was very easy to create because she is based almost entirely on myself at the age of 11. She is really a caricature of me.”

— J.K. Rowling

“She might even have grown to love him romantically (she certainly loved him as a friend) if he had not loved Dark Magic so much, and been drawn to such loathesome people and acts.”

— J.K. Rowling

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.”

— J.K. Rowling

“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

“What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters; for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.”

— J.K. Rowling

“That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we…”

— J.K. Rowling

“Lupin’s condition of lycanthropy (being a werewolf) was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS.”

— J.K. Rowling

“The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes.”

— J.K. Rowling

“There is something about a mass of human beings. There's always an edge in a crowd. Always.”

— J.K. Rowling

“What I've tried to show in the Potter books, and what I feel strongly myself, is that we should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain.”

— J.K. Rowling

“There is no book on this planet that I would burn, including books that I do think are damaging. Burning, to me, is the last resort of people who cannot argue.”

— J.K. Rowling

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