Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.

Lee Jordan was finding it difficult not to take sides. 'So — after that obvious and disgusting bit of cheating —' 'Jordan!' growled Professor McGonagall. 'I mean after that open and revolting foul —' 'Jordan, I'm warning you —' 'All right, all right. Flint nearly kills the Gryffindor Seeker, which could happen to anyone, I'm sure, so a penalty to Gryffindor, taken by Spinnet, who puts it away, no trouble, and we continue play, Gryffindor still in possession.

I'm not so naive that I didn't know or didn't suspect that, at some point, someone was going to say "You're writing about the occult." My wizarding world is a world of imagination. I think it is a moral world.

He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting up in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: 'To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!

Personally, I'd have welcomed a dementor attack. A deadly struggle for my soul would have broken the monotony nicely.

Their reward for enduring the awful experience was the right to tell people about it.

Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.