“Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy."[Harry Potter Beyond the Page: A Virtual Author Visit with J.K. Rowling (Scholastic / Stacks webcast, October 11, 2012)]”

“Nine years ago, my sister handed me a paperback she had picked up in an airport shop on her way to India. It was a gloomy-looking book, with a black an white photo of a steam train approaching through fog on the cover. Cutting across the top of the photo was . . . an author's name I did not know: J.K. Rowling. I began to read the novel and by page three, I was hooked.”

“We want to fight.”“And I want J.K. Rowling to keep writing in the Potterverse, but I know that’s never going to happen,” I said blithely.”

“and suddenly I am washed over by a wave of happiness for it, for my little story, because it is a place, a home even, and I can go back to it from wherever I am”

“I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.”

“HELLO? HELLO? CAN YOU HEAR ME? I-WANT-TO-TALK-TO-HARRY-POTTER!”