Quotes from Joanne Harris

Before you have children, you mostly think about the world in terms of yourself. And when you become a parent, the focus shifts to somebody else.

We spoke French at home and I didn't know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.

I'm quite an untidy person in a lot of ways. But order makes me happy. I have to have a clear desk and a tidy desktop, with as few visual distractions as possible. I don't mind sound distractions, but visual ones freak me out.

When I write, I'm constantly putting myself in the position of someone else as I write using myriad voices; I think that's a life skill all people should learn.

A man who casts no shadow isn't really a man at all.

It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.

Everything comes home, my mother used to say; every word spoken, every shadow cast, every footprint in the sand. It can't be helped; it's part of what makes us who we are.

Don't worry so much about 'not supposed to'.

I've never been very good at leaving things behind. I tried, but I have always left fragments of myself there too, like seeds awaiting their chance to grow.

A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after.

From a very young age my mother persuaded me that I could write for fun, but I had to have a proper job - very good advice.

I believe that being happy is the only important thing. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or torturous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.

I've nothing against kids reading anything they please, but I do have a problem with pink books for girls and black books for boys.

I dream a lot, in colour and in sound and scent. Quite a few of my stories have come from dreams.

I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.

I'm insatiably curious.

I first saw the island of Noirmoutier when I was two weeks old. I think it's probably safe to say that I didn't fully appreciate it at the time; but I grew to love it as year after year I spent holidays there at my grandparents' cottage.

Some areas of technology really don't interest me at all, but I welcome anything that makes life easier instead of harder.

My parents were language teachers. They talked about teaching all the time and all their friends were teachers. It was considered a pre-ordained thing that I would go into teaching.

I have an advanced degree in procrastination and another one in paranoia.

Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.

I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.

Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.