Top 100 Joanne Harris Quotes
#1. Rock salt and bread by the doorstep to placate any resident gods. Sandalwood on our pillow, to sweeten our dreams.
Joanne Harris
#2. Work. Like pain, I sensed that this was an experience I would want to avoid as often as possible.
Joanne Harris
#3. What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?
Joanne Harris
#4. The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy ... The magic of everyday things.
Joanne Harris
#5. As authors, we all expect criticism from time to time, and we all have our ways of coping with unfriendly reviews.
Joanne Harris
#6. The interesting thing about the Internet is that it has created a kind of alternative circle of friends for people.
Joanne Harris
#7. I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.
Joanne Harris
#8. There was a quote he could not quite remember, something about the past being an island surrounded by time. He had missed the last boat to the island.
Joanne Harris
#9. You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.
Joanne Harris
#10. Places have their own characters ... But the people begin to look the same.
Joanne Harris
#12. So much of his life seemed to be like this now, a blur of days without anything to define them from each other, like episodes of a soap he watched out of habit, even though none of the characters interested him.
Joanne Harris
#13. Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his flock unruly, definant. I cannot afford to be lenient.
Joanne Harris
#14. Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'
Joanne Harris
#16. 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.
Joanne Harris
#17. 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.
Joanne Harris
#18. I have an English identity and a French identity. When I'm in France, I'm more outgoing. And the French part of me cooks, whereas the English part of me writes.
Joanne Harris
#19. Nothing dreamed is ever lost, and nothing lost forever.
Joanne Harris
#20. Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.
Joanne Harris
#21. I can smell her perfume, something flowery, too strong in this enclosed darkness. I wonder if this is temptation. If so, I am stone.
Joanne Harris
#22. Remember, it's the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings.
Joanne Harris
#23. My mother have taught me that food is a universal passport. Whatever the constraints of language, culture or geography, food crosses over all boundaries. To offer food is to extend the hand of friendship; to accept is to be accepted into the most closed of communities. I
Joanne Harris
#24. I think if you are an outsider then you are an outsider always.
Joanne Harris
#25. I don't think that white collar gives you sole right of access to the divine.
Joanne Harris
#26. Does that mean I can't hammer him?' said Thor.
Heimdall scowled. 'Not yet,' he said.'When can I hammer him, please?' said Thor.
Joanne Harris
#27. At such times I feel I could die for love of her, my little stranger, my heart swelling dangerously so that the only release is to run too, my red coat flapping around my shoulders like wings, my hair a comet's tail in the patchy blue sky.
Joanne Harris
#28. 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.
Joanne Harris
#30. A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.
Joanne Harris
#32. You may be a foreigner, but you have the heart of a Frenchman.
Joanne Harris
#34. There's good news and slightly less good news.
Joanne Harris
#35. I liked her better for showing a little spirit.
Joanne Harris
#36. We do not simply get showered with Hollywood money because we happened to write a little story about wizards one day. It's not winning the lottery. It's a real job, which real people do, and they have the same real problems as other real people.
Joanne Harris
#37. Better a king in the gutter,' he said, 'than a slave in an emperor's place
Joanne Harris
#38. I don't pretend to know much about love, but that's how great love comes to an end, not in the flames of passion, but in the silence of regret.
Joanne Harris
#39. People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.
Joanne Harris
#40. Sometimes survival is the worst alternative there is
Joanne Harris
#41. I'm not sure I believe in the whole 'ghost-afterlife' thing, but I think places are marked by people who have been there.
Joanne Harris
#42. Wisdom isn't everything. Survival requires an element of trickery, Chaos, subterfuge. All qualities I possess (if I may say so) in abundance.
Joanne Harris
#43. I don't listen to music when I'm writing, but I often do when I'm reworking, editing or when I need to relax.
Joanne Harris
#44. The advantage of travel is that after a while you begin to realize that wherever you go, most people aren't really all that much different.
Joanne Harris
#45. A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.
Joanne Harris
#46. All schools have their skeletons. St Oswald's is no exception. Most of the time, we try our best to keep them in the closet. But this time, the only recourse we have is to throw open all the closets, light as many bulbs as we can and catch the vermin as it comes out.
Joanne Harris
#47. For me, the magic of Hawaii comes from the stillness, the sea, the stars.
Joanne Harris
#49. He was the cleanest-cut comic-book schoolboy hero imaginable.
Joanne Harris
#51. 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.
Joanne Harris
#52. We came in the wind of the carnival. A wind of change, or promises. The merry wind, the magical wind, making March hares of everyone, tumbling blossoms and coat-tails and hats; rushing towards summer in a frenzy of exuberance.
Joanne Harris
#53. But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.
Joanne Harris
#54. The wind always brings us back to the same wall
Joanne Harris
#55. I've never viewed you as an enemy, more an adversary ...
Joanne Harris
#56. 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.
Joanne Harris
#57. You seem to know a lot about it," she said. "And you do subtleties."
"Yeah. Like I've always wanted to destroy the Nine Worlds while committing suicide."
"Well, there's no need to be rude," protested Sif.
Joanne Harris
#59. I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate
and volatile
I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.
Joanne Harris
#60. But I rather thought
I mean, I heard you'd killed Balder the Fair."
"I never did," snapped Loki crossly. "Well, no one ever proved I did. What happened to the presumption of innocence? Besides, he was supposed to be invulnerable. Was it my fault that he wasn't?
Joanne Harris
#61. I'm incapable of hiding my feelings when I'm around someone I don't like.
Joanne Harris
#62. It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.
Joanne Harris
#64. I am fascinated by how people eat and what it reveals about them.
Joanne Harris
#65. 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.
Joanne Harris
#66. Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.
Joanne Harris
#67. Those people who say that words have no power know nothing of the nature of words. Words, well placed, can end a regime; can turn affection to hatred; can start a religion or even a war. Words are the shepherds of lies; they lead the best of us to the slaughter.
Joanne Harris
#68. 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.
Joanne Harris
#69. I'm sorry. You went too far.'
Lovely. What an epitaph.
Joanne Harris
#70. Like a flower she grows towards the light, without thinking or examining the process which moves her to do so. I wish I could do the same.
Joanne Harris
#71. Children are knives, my mother once said. They don't mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don't we, we clasp them until the blood flows.
Joanne Harris
#72. It may be something to do with my having been to a girls' school, but I'm far more comfortable making male friendships than female ones. My friends tend to be men and their significant others.
Joanne Harris
#73. Change isn't always comfortable, but it is a fact of life.
Joanne Harris
#74. An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
No one's immune to bribery.
Joanne Harris
#75. Polite contempt. The barbed and poisonous weapon of the righteous.
Joanne Harris
#76. Set a church clock wrong to fool the devil, my mother always told me. But in this case I suspect the devil is not fooled.
Not for a minute.
Joanne Harris
#78. Like a domestic cat, purring on the sofa by day, but by night, a strutting queen, a natural killer, disdainful of her other life.
Joanne Harris
#79. Their love was something which coloured the air between them like sunlight.
Joanne Harris
#80. I don't understand a word you're saying," snapped Odin.
"That's because you're throttlin' me, sir," said Sugar.
Odin loosened his grip.
Joanne Harris
#81. They tell you revenge isn't worth it. I say there's nothing finer.
Joanne Harris
#82. At17, balanced on that precarious walkway between adolescence and adulthood, the world is a crazy obstacle course paved one day with broken glass, the next with apple blossom.
Joanne Harris
#83. 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.
Joanne Harris
#84. One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.
Joanne Harris
#85. Some people spend the whole of their lives sitting waiting for one train, only to find that they never even made it to the station.
Joanne Harris
#86. More. Oh that word. That deceptive word. That eater of lives; that malcontent.
Joanne Harris
#87. Not that a promise means much to a demon - or a god.
Joanne Harris
#88. Wild birds will kill exotic ones: the budgies and the lovebirds and the yellow canaries
escaped from their cages and hoping to get a taste of the sky
usually end up back on the ground, plucked raw by their more conformist cousins
Joanne Harris
#90. I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.
Joanne Harris
#91. Online communities are an expression of loneliness.
Joanne Harris
#92. I love it when my books cause controversy, when people argue violently about the ending.
Joanne Harris
#93. I'm warning you now," said Freyja stiffly, "I have ... certain issues ... with Loki." (Maddy wondered briefly whether there was anyone in the Nine Worlds who didn't have issues with Loki.)
Joanne Harris
#94. Weeds and wheat cannot grow peacefully together. Any gardener could tell you the same thing.
Joanne Harris
#95. 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.
Joanne Harris
#96. I can write absolutely anywhere. All I need is a laptop.
Joanne Harris
#97. In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.
Joanne Harris
#98. The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.
Joanne Harris
#100. No one should be so precious as to refuse criticism of their work. But to respect an opinion, we have to know that it was given honestly and with proper thought.
Joanne Harris
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