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You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare.

People can get certain good things out of fame, but until it killed a princess nobody ever talked about how bad it can be.

You know that I had heard so many times people say things like, 'You could never write 'Harry Potter' and have it be about Harriett Potter because nobody would read it; people only want to read an adventure story if it's about a boy,' and I thought, 'I don't think that's true.'

The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.

We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works.

I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.