“I mean, I knew I wasn't a nice person, but what did I do in my past life to deserve this? I must have hit a bus full of nuns while driving a stolen car on my way to selling drugs to schoolchildren!”

“I'm working! What are you doing? Besides being...Being what?Wait a minute...Sarcastic? Unfeeling? British?It's an animal.Where?No, the word!Still you have to admit, I am... very British. I don't say hard R's.You know what I like? Brown sauce. What's it made of? Science doesn't know!It's made of brown.Brown. Mined from the earth by the hardscrabble brown miners of North Brownderton.Oh, my God. I find lentils completely incomprehensible. What the sun-dappled hell is Echo doing at Fremont?That's got nothing to do with the drug, which means our problems are huge and indomitable.Ooh. I could eat that word. Or a crisp. Do you have any crisps?You haven't seen my drawer of inappropriate starches? C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon!Oh my god, I'm having such a terrible day.”

“All right, Emma. You brought me in. You made your move. Just like I knew you would. A nice move. Now it's my turn.”

“Wherever I was, I was happy. At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time didn't mean anything, nothing had form but I was still me, you know? And I was warm and I was loved and I was finished. Complete. I don't understand about theology or dimensions, or any of it, really but I think I was in heaven. And now I'm not. I was torn out of there. Pulled out by my friends. Everything here is hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch this is hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that knowing what I've lost...”

“It is the most fun I’m ever going to have. I love to write. I love it. I mean, there’s nothing in the world I like better, and that includes sex, probably because I’m so very bad at it. It’s the greatest peace when I’m in a scene, and it’s just me and the character, that’s it, that’s where I want to live my life.”

“I also felt that Ron and Hermione would have gotten divorced. I'm sorry, I just do. The end of Harry Potter did feel ultimately to me...just the fact everybody had married everybody. The books were so real and so grounded in what things are really like when you're that age, she nailed that so beautifully. And then there was this slightly fantastical ending. I know that was there for her to say, 'Really, I mean it, no more books,' but you do sort of go, people who were in a war are different from people who haven't been, and how does it affect them? But am I going to second-guess my favorite writer? I think not.”

“At the end of the day I have many answers for it. It has to do with my mom, who was an extraordinary woman, and a great feminist. It has to do with the people in my life. It has to do with a lot of different things, but -- I don't know! Because I'm not just writing from the female characters for other people. I have a desire to see them in our culture -- that was not met for most of my childhood. Except occasionally by James Cameron. [From the 2011 San Diego Comic Con, in response to being asked why he writes strong female characters.]”