J. K. Rowling Quotes

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.

When I was five, I think, that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

If I had my own Neverland it would probably be the coolest place in the world. You could do anything you want there. There would be trees everywhere.

I was passionate. I found something that I loved. I could be all alone in a big old skating rink and nobody could get near me and I didn't have to talk to anybody because of my shyness. It was great. I was in my fantasy world.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

I actually enjoy the fantasy world quite a bit. You have no boundaries.

There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.

It was almost like being a child again because you felt like you were in your bedroom and it almost felt like no one was really watching you. So, you were just kind of having a bit of fun on your own doing silly voices in the bedroom.

I was 13 and a teenager, as well. When you're that age, you want to be an adult, in a way, but you don't want to have the responsibilities of an adult. You still want to have the freedom.

The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other...

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

I knew naturally as a child not to forfeit my creativity to a world that's all laid out for me. I'll look at everything around me and vow to keep in mind that alla this is just someone's idea. It could have just as well been mine.

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

Words make another place, a place to escape to with your spirit alone.

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?

It is a happiness to wonder; -- it is a happiness to dream.

Anon, to sudden silence won, In fancy they pursue The dream-child moving through the land Of wonders wild and new, In friendly chat with bird or beast - And half believe it true.

To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times - The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.

A conditioned mind may be inventive; it may think up new ideas, new phrases, new gadgets; it may build a dam, plan a new society, and all the rest of it; but that is not creativity. Creativity is something much more than the mere capacity to acquire a technique. It is because this extraordinary thing called creativity is not in most of us that we are so shallow, empty, insufficient. And only the mind that is free can be creative.

So she sat on with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality.

A reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination.