Quotes from Joanne Harris

The interesting thing about the Internet is that it has created a kind of alternative circle of friends for people.

I was a very bad accountant; I didn't care about money, golf or discovering fraud. After about a year I was sacked; then I went into teacher training.

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.

Their love was something which coloured the air between them like sunlight.

Love not often, but forever.

I love it when my books cause controversy, when people argue violently about the ending.

I was convinced I'd hate Twitter - but I've come to like it very much. I use it mostly to keep in touch with friends and colleagues I wish I could see more often - I sometimes feel a little isolated living in Yorkshire, and it's nice to have the contact.

Death should be a celebration. Like a birthday. I want to go up like a rocket when my time comes, and fall down in a cloud of stars, and hear everyone go: ahh!

I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.

My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete.

For me, the magic of Hawaii comes from the stillness, the sea, the stars.

I tend to write about more than one generation because as a child I had contact with more than one generation; it was normal to be around older people.

Online communities are an expression of loneliness.

People reveal so much of their mental processes online, simply because the psychological effect of anonymity just means that a whole raft of inhibitions are left alone when people log on.

Garden work clears the mind.

If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It's the ethic my mother brought me up with.

I find littering very annoying. It's a minor but also a major thing: a society that litters is one that also has so little respect for the environment and, consequently, other people. If we had clean streets, a lot of other things would be fixed almost effortlessly.

I think if you are an outsider then you are an outsider always.

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.

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.

Places do not lose their identity, however far one travels. It is the heart that begins to erode over time. The face in the hotel mirror seems blurred some mornings, as if by too many casual looks. By ten the sheets will be laundered, the carpet swept. The names on the hotel registers change as we pass. We leave no trace as we pass on. Ghostlike, we cast no shadow.

Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, . . . some lies can be true, . . . broken faith may be restored.

A demon, if you prefer the term; although to be honest, the difference between god and a demon is really only a matter of perspective.

The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things.