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In all my books, I try to have a strong element of realism underlying the fantastic.

It's like a candy store for an illustrator, I connected with Harry pretty quickly and loved the way J.K. described everything; she's such a visually thinking person. You can't pass that up.

One of the things I strive for is realism. I need to be as real as possible in the dilemmas my characters face.

And I have exposed myself to art so that my work has something beyond just the usual potter.

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.

Realism isn't something most people associate with the fantasy genre, yet it's an essential element of great fantasy writing.

You know, it's a hugely difficult thing to take any work of art or drawing and say 'make that real.'

It seemed to me that you make magic real by making it a little prosaic, a little difficult and disappointing - never quite as glamorous as the other characters imagine.

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves.