The best way to get children excited about reading is to read to them from the beginning of their lives.

I never know," Harry called to Hagrid over the noise of the cart, "What's the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite?" "Stalagmite's got an 'm' in it," said Hagrid.

Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

I am not trying to influence anyone into black magic. That is the very last thing I'd want to do.

Some readers and commentators really want to scrape your insides out to make sense of your work. Others say, there's the work, it speaks for itself. Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle.

The fridge had been emptied of all Dudley’s favorite things — fizzy drinks and cakes, chocolate bars and burgers — and filled instead with fruit and vegetables and the sorts of things that Uncle Vernon called “rabbit food.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. The wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.