Joanne Harris Quotes

She always had that about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world.

Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.

It isn't just a village. The houses aren't just places to live. Everything belongs to everybody. Everyone belongs to everyone else. Even a single person can make a difference.

I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.

A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.

I've never been very good at leaving things behind. I tried, but I have always left fragments of myself there too, like seeds awaiting their chance to grow.

We came in the wind of the carnival. A wind of change, or promises. The merry wind, the magical wind, making March hares of everyone, tumbling blossoms and coat-tails and hats; rushing towards summer in a frenzy of exuberance.

I have an advanced degree in procrastination and another one in paranoia.

...we do not simply get showered with Hollywood money because we happened to write a little story about wizards one day. It's not winning the lottery. It's a real job, which real people do, and they have the same real problems as other real people.

Some people spend the whole of their lives sitting waiting for one train, only to find that they never even made it to the station.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.

Everything comes home, my mother used to say; every word spoken, every shadow cast, every footprint in the sand. It can't be helped; it's part of what makes us who we are.

Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, heart and soul.

Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.

I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.

As authors, we all expect criticism from time to time, and we all have our ways of coping with unfriendly reviews.

People reveal so much of their mental processes online, simply because the psychological effect of anonymity just means that a whole raft of inhibitions are left alone when people log on.

I'm not fond of cities: the constant activity and swarms of people.

In any case, fire burns; that's its nature, and you can't expect to change that. You can use it to cook your meat or to burn down your neighbor's house. And is the fire you use for cooking any different from the one you use for burning? And does that mean you should eat your supper raw?" Maddy shook her head, still puzzled. "So what you're saying is . . . I shouldn't play with fire," she said at last. Of course you should," said One-Eye gently. "But don't be surprised if the fire plays back.

Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his flock unruly, definant. I cannot afford to be lenient.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

Guilleaume left La Praline with a small bag of florentines in his pocket; before he had turned the corner of avenue des Francs Bourgeois I saw him stoop to offer one to the dog. A pat, a bark, a wagging of the short stubby tail. As I said, some people never have to think about giving.

Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.

Death should be a celebration. Like a birthday. I want to go up like a rocket when my time comes, and fall down in a cloud of stars, and hear everyone go: ahh!

I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crashing among the hazels and nougatines

For me, the magic of Hawaii comes from the stillness, the sea, the stars.

You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.

A man who casts no shadow isn't really a man at all.

I carried recipes in my head like maps.

I'm politically inclined towards the left, but I don't like to be in anyone's gang; I'm a bit of a loose cannon.

Nat Parson says it's the devil's mark." "Nat Parson's a gobshite." Maddy was torn between a natural feeling of sacrilege and a deep admiration of anyone who dared call a parson 'gobshite.

My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete.

In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known.

Like a domestic cat, purring on the sofa by day, but by night, a strutting queen, a natural killer, disdainful of her other life.

Love not often, but forever.

I dream a lot, in colour and in sound and scent. Quite a few of my stories have come from dreams.

I like autumn. The drama of it; the golden lion roaring through the back door of the year, shaking its mane of leaves. A dangerous time; of violent rages and deceptive calm, of fireworks in the pockets and conkers in the fist.

If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It's the ethic my mother brought me up with.

I'm incapable of hiding my feelings when I'm around someone I don't like.

I think everybody has a secret life.

I love it when my books cause controversy, when people argue violently about the ending.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.

I have a tendency to pick up my own challenges. The more difficult something it is, the more I want to try it.

I don't listen to music when I'm writing, but I often do when I'm reworking, editing or when I need to relax.

I can write absolutely anywhere. All I need is a laptop.

I am not at all a chocoholic. I would rather eat anchovy toast.

From a very young age my mother persuaded me that I could write for fun, but I had to have a proper job - very good advice.

Before you have children, you mostly think about the world in terms of yourself. And when you become a parent, the focus shifts to somebody else.