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. – Joanne Harris
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
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. – Joanne Harris
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
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
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. – Joanne Harris
If you can actually get someone to sit on the edge of their seat and feel nervous if there’s a knock at the door, then you’ve done something pretty terrific as a writer. – Joanne Harris
I sublimate different parts of my personality through my characters. Which is worrying, as some of them can be a bit nasty. I’m pleased the stuff on the page isn’t inside me any more. – Joanne Harris
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
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
I dream a lot, in colour and in sound and scent. Quite a few of my stories have come from dreams. – Joanne Harris
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. – Joanne Harris
I had a great grandmother who believed in so many strange superstitions. She used to tell the future from the things that catch on to the hem of your skirt when you’ve been sewing, and different colored threads would mean different things… Of course, all that influenced me quite a lot as a child. – Joanne Harris
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
I have a tendency to pick up my own challenges. The more difficult something it is, the more I want to try it. – Joanne Harris
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
Some areas of technology really don’t interest me at all, but I welcome anything that makes life easier instead of harder. – Joanne Harris
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
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
