J. K. Rowling Quotes

I think that I'm going to write a bigger thing, and then I end up writing about people, and the bigger thing recedes into the background, and hope that it's still there.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

If I'm doing my job right, then I'm not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I'm just jotting it down.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

I enjoy writing dialogue; it comes naturally to me.

I love the writing process. It's something that I'm interested in personally and something I always do on every movie.

When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood - all the stuff that comes.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.

I imagine them very clearly and then attempt to describe what I can see. Sometimes I draw them for my own amusement! (talking about her characters and scenes)

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

I could name you a dozen superheroes whose powers I'd like to have. But if I could have any power in the world, it would be the power to read or watch a creative work and absorb the technical skill of the people who made it. Because then I could have even more fun writing. That's my core identity. I'm a writer. I just love telling stories.

Personally, I've made myself a very small window of what I enjoy in this business, which is I love being a big part of the storytelling process.

I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about.

People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.