Joanne Harris Quotations

We spoke French at home and I didn't know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.

Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'

Some areas of technology really don't interest me at all, but I welcome anything that makes life easier instead of harder.

No one should be so precious as to refuse criticism of their work. But to respect an opinion, we have to know that it was given honestly and with proper thought.

I was a very bad accountant; I didn't care about money, golf or discovering fraud. After about a year I was sacked; then I went into teacher training.

I have an English identity and a French identity. When I'm in France, I'm more outgoing. And the French part of me cooks, whereas the English part of me writes.

I find littering very annoying. It's a minor but also a major thing: a society that litters is one that also has so little respect for the environment and, consequently, other people. If we had clean streets, a lot of other things would be fixed almost effortlessly.

I first saw the island of Noirmoutier when I was two weeks old. I think it's probably safe to say that I didn't fully appreciate it at the time; but I grew to love it as year after year I spent holidays there at my grandparents' cottage.

I was convinced I'd hate Twitter - but I've come to like it very much. I use it mostly to keep in touch with friends and colleagues I wish I could see more often - I sometimes feel a little isolated living in Yorkshire, and it's nice to have the contact.

My parents were language teachers. They talked about teaching all the time and all their friends were teachers. It was considered a pre-ordained thing that I would go into teaching.

I tend to write about more than one generation because as a child I had contact with more than one generation; it was normal to be around older people.

All those moments, those memories. Everything that we are, compressed in just two or three kilos of paper — the weight of a human heart.

When I write, I'm constantly putting myself in the position of someone else as I write using myriad voices; I think that's a life skill all people should learn.

It may be something to do with my having been to a girls' school, but I'm far more comfortable making male friendships than female ones. My friends tend to be men and their significant others.

The interesting thing about the Internet is that it has created a kind of alternative circle of friends for people.

I'm quite an untidy person in a lot of ways. But order makes me happy. I have to have a clear desk and a tidy desktop, with as few visual distractions as possible. I don't mind sound distractions, but visual ones freak me out.

If you can actually get someone to sit on the edge of their seat and feel nervous if there's a knock at the door, then you've done something pretty terrific as a writer.

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

I had a great grandmother who believed in so many strange superstitions. She used to tell the future from the things that catch on to the hem of your skirt when you've been sewing, and different colored threads would mean different things... Of course, all that influenced me quite a lot as a child.

I sublimate different parts of my personality through my characters. Which is worrying, as some of them can be a bit nasty. I'm pleased the stuff on the page isn't inside me any more.

You seem to know a lot about it," she said. "And you do subtleties." "Yeah. Like I've always wanted to destroy the Nine Worlds while committing suicide." "Well, there's no need to be rude," protested Sif.

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 wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

And so Nat stood up and joined the group, and followed, and watched, and awaited his chance as the light of Chaos lit the plain and gods and demons marched to war.

Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.

The dead know everything but they don't give a damn.

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

Their love was something which coloured the air between them like sunlight.

I've nothing against kids reading anything they please, but I do have a problem with pink books for girls and black books for boys.

The wind always brings us back to the same wall

I'd rather be a freak than a clone.

If you want to know what's important to a culture, learn their language.

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.

I speak as I must and cannot be silent.

Drunkeness, she told us in a rare moment of confidence, is a sin against the fruit, the tree, the wine itself. Wine, distilled and nurtured from bud into fruit; it deserves reverance. Joy. Gentleness. (Page 194.)

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.

A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.

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.

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.

Love not often, but forever.

The process of giving is without limits.

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.

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

A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after.

It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.

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.

Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, . . . some lies can be true, . . . broken faith may be restored.

The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things.

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

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

That wind. I see it's blowing now. Furtive but commanding, it has dictated every move we've ever made. My mother felt it, and so do I - even here, even now - as it sweeps us like leaves into his backseat corner, dancing us to shreds against the stones. V'la l'bon vent, v'a l'joli vent. I though we'd silenced it for good. But the smallest thing can wake the wind@ a word, a sign, even a death. There's no such thing as a trivial thing. Everything costs; it all adds up until finally the balance shifts and we're gone again, back on the road, telling ourselves - well maybe next time

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

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

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.

I am fascinated by how people eat and what it reveals about them.

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.

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

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

Remember, it's the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings.

A thing named is a thing tamed.

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.

Online communities are an expression of loneliness.

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

I'm insatiably curious.

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

I think if you are an outsider then you are an outsider always.

I think everybody has a secret life.

Sometimes survival is the worst alternative there is

...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.

I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.

I'm not sure I believe in the whole 'ghost-afterlife' thing, but I think places are marked by people who have been there.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

Change isn't always comfortable, but it is a fact of life.

The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won’t I? in pitiful indecision.

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.

I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.

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.

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.

This isn't the first time the world has come to an end, and it won't be the last either.

The great thing about books is that you can end with a question mark.

Anything that can be dreamed is true.

A named thing is a tamed thing.

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.

The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.

You priests. You're all the same. You think fasting helps you think about God, when anyone who can cook would tell you that fasting just makes you think about food.

Somehow the anticipation of pain can be even more troubling, more a misery than the pain itself.

Clones fit in. Freaks stand out. Ask me which one I prefer.

Our lives are like these things I make. Turn 'em, build 'em, bake 'em in fire. That's what you've been, son. Baked and fired. But a pot don't have the right to choose whether he be for water, wine, or just left empty. You have, son. You have.

But I rather thought--I mean, I heard you'd killed Balder the Fair." "I never did," snapped Loki crossly. "Well, no one ever proved I did. What happened to the presumption of innocence? Besides, he was supposed to be invulnerable. Was it my fault that he wasn't?

Places do not lose their identity, however far one travels. It is the heart that begins to erode over time. The face in the hotel mirror seems blurred some mornings, as if by too many casual looks. By ten the sheets will be laundered, the carpet swept. The names on the hotel registers change as we pass. We leave no trace as we pass on. Ghostlike, we cast no shadow.

Garden work clears the mind.

I carried recipes in my head like maps.

Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.

I liked her better for showing a little spirit.

Anything based on ancient texts is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around.