Autor: Tradutores

Tradução: Virag
Revisão: Adriana Snape

Grossman, Lev. “J.K. Rowling Hogwarts And All,” Time Magazine, 17 July, 2005

As the much awaited Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince arrives in stores, J.K. Rowling talks frankly to Lev Grossman about fantasy, fathers and how the magic is almost over.

Here is a J.K. Rowling who lives in the hearts and minds of children everywhere. She has a fairy wand and hair of spun gold, and when she laughs her tinkly laugh, tiny silver bubbles come out of her mouth.

That J.K. Rowling, however, doesn’t exist. Here’s a look at the real Jo Rowling (rhymes with bowling, by the way, not howling) at work five years ago on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: “Goblet–oh, my God. That was the period where I was chewing Nicorette. And then I started smoking again, but I didn’t stop the Nicorette. And I swear on my children’s lives, I was going to bed at night and having palpitations and having to get up and drink some wine to put myself into a sufficient stupor.”

Little children everywhere should be grateful for the real Jo Rowling. Because if the imaginary one had written the Harry Potter books, just think how incredibly boring they’d be.

The real Rowling’s hair is sort of gold, although at the moment it has about an inch of dark roots. Which is understandable, since in the past six months she has given birth to her third child–daughter Mackenzie–and completed the sixth book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was released promptly at midnight on Friday. At 39, Rowling is a tall handsome woman with a long face, a slightly crooked nose and interestingly hooded eyes. Sitting at a conference table in a bungalow adjoining her stately Edinburgh home (neither her only nor her stateliest home), she talks rapidly, even a little nervously. She uses the word obviously way more often than the average person does, and she likes to say outrageous things, then break out into fits of throaty alto laughter to show you she’s just joking. Rowling wears all black–a floppy black sweater, black pants. A glance under the table reveals shiny black leather boots with steel spike heels that are, at the very least, three inches long.

Fans send Rowling wands and quills by the bushel, but she admits, a bit shamefacedly, that she never actually uses them and that the wands go straight to her oldest daughter, Jessica. The most popular living fantasy writer in the world doesn’t even especially like fantasy novels. It wasn’t until after Sorcerer’s Stone was published that it even occurred to her that she had written one. “That’s the honest truth,” she says. “You know, the unicorns were in there. There was the castle, God knows. But I really had not thought that that’s what I was doing. And I think maybe the reason that it didn’t occur to me is that I’m not a huge fan of fantasy.” Rowling has never finished The Lord of the Rings. She hasn’t even read all of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia novels, which her books get compared to a lot. There’s something about Lewis’ sentimentality about children that gets on her nerves. “There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex,” Rowling says. “I have a big problem with that.”

Rowling certainly isn’t afraid of sex, as Order of the Phoenix–which had Harry making out with the beautiful, grieving Cho Chang–ably demonstrated. Harry and his friends are now 16, and it would just be weird if Harry didn’t have more on his mind than wands and snitches. “Because of the demands of the adventure that Harry is following, he has had less sexual experience than boys of his age might have had,” Rowling allows. “But I really wanted my heroes to grow up. Ron’s hormones get fuller play in book six.” Cue the throaty alto laughter. “Basically it dawns on Ron that Hermione’s had some action, Harry’s had some action and he’s never got close!”

It’s precisely Rowling’s lack of sentimentality, her earthy, salty realness, her refusal to buy into the basic clichés of fantasy, that make her such a great fantasy writer. The genre tends to be deeply conservative–politically, culturally, psychologically. It looks backward to an idealized, romanticized, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves. Rowling’s books aren’t like that. They take place in the 1990s–not in some never-never Narnia but in modern-day Mugglish England, with cars, telephones and PlayStations. Rowling adapts an inherently conservative genre for her own progressive purposes. Her Hogwarts is secular and sexual and multicultural and multiracial and even sort of multimedia, with all those talking ghosts. If Lewis showed up there, let’s face it, he’d probably wind up a Death Eater.

Granted, Rowling’s books begin like invitations to garden-variety escapism: Ooh, Harry isn’t really a poor orphan; he’s actually a wealthy wizard who rides a secret train to a castle, and so on. But as they go on, you realize that while the fun stuff is pure cotton candy, the problems are very real–embarrassment, prejudice, depression, anger, poverty, death. “I was trying to subvert the genre,” Rowling explains bluntly. “Harry goes off into this magical world, and is it any better than the world he’s left? Only because he meets nicer people. Magic does not make his world better significantly. The relationships make his world better. Magic in many ways complicates his life.”

And unlike Lewis, whose books are drenched in theology, Rowling refuses to view herself as a moral educator to the millions of children who read her books. “I don’t think that it’s at all healthy for the work for me to think in those terms. So I don’t,” she says. “I never think in terms of What am I going to teach them? Or, What would it be good for them to find out here?”

“Although,” she adds, “undeniably, morals are drawn.” But she doesn’t make it easy. In Goblet, the good-hearted Cedric Diggory dies for no reason. In Phoenix, we learn that Harry’s dad, whom he idealized, had been an arrogant bully. People aren’t good and bad by nature; they change and transform and struggle. As Dumbledore tells Harry, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” Granted, we know Harry will not succumb to anger and evil. But we never stop feeling that he could. (Interestingly, although Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland, the books are free of references to God. On this point, Rowling is cagey. “Um. I don’t think they’re that secular,” she says, choosing her words slowly. “But, obviously, Dumbledore is not Jesus.”)

There are limits to Harry Potter’s sophistication. Since Sorcerer’s Stone was published in 1998, world events have moved to the point where they threaten to ask more from the books than they have to give. By Phoenix, the fifth book in the series, Harry is embroiled in a borderless, semi-civil war with a shadowy, hidden leader whose existence the government ignored until disaster forced the issue and who is supported by a secret network of sleeper agents willing to resort to tactics of shocking cruelty. The kids who grew up on Harry Potter–you could call them Generation Hex–are the kids who grew up with the pervasive threat of terrorism, and it’s inevitable that on some level they’ll make a connection between the two.

Which isn’t a terrible thing necessarily. But the series’ major shortcoming to date is the flatness of Harry’s antagonist Voldemort (whose name Rowling pronounces with a silent t). In the past few books, Voldemort has managed to assemble a body, but he still lacks any kind of realistic motivation. You get no sense of where his boundless enthusiasm for being evil comes from. “You will,” Rowling says. “There is obviously a big gap there, and in six Harry finds out a lot of Voldemort’s history. Though he was never that nice a guy.” She laughs.

No, he wasn’t. Half-Blood Prince goes a long way, finally, to working through Rowling’s take on the psychology of evil, largely through a kind of Pensieve-aided documentary of Voldemort’s early life. Much of Rowling’s understanding of the origins of evil has to do with the role of the father in family life. “As I look back over the five published books,” she says, “I realize that it’s kind of a litany of bad fathers. That’s where evil seems to flourish, in places where people didn’t get good fathering.” Some of that must surely flow from her own experiences: her relationship with her father has been uneven, and the father of her oldest daughter is no longer part of Rowling’s life.

Despite her colossal success, which has run her personal fortune into the hundreds of millions, you can still feel Rowling’s enormous, churning ambition for her work, which seems to be fueled at least in part by lingering feelings of insecurity and self-doubt. Maybe it’s her well-known history as a onetime careerless divorced mom who spent nearly a year on public assistance, but she still constantly questions her writing, reviewing it like a boxer watching tapes of his fights. “I think Phoenix could have been shorter. I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end,” she says. She is worried that Goblet was overpraised. “In every single book, there’s stuff I would go back and rewrite,” she says. “But I think I really planned the hell out of this one. I took three months and just sat there and went over and over and over the plan, really fine-tuned it, looked at it from every angle. I had learnt, maybe, from past mistakes.”

This obsessive focus on perfection can leave Rowling a little unavailable to those around her. She tells the story of a conversation she had with her younger sister–Di, 38–about Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore, who Di feels sometimes lacks compassion for his charges. “She said, ‘That’s like you.’ And I said, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ As sisters do. And she said, ‘Well, you are kind of detached.’ That was, you know, uncomfortable, and probably quite illuminating. I maybe wouldn’t find it as easy as she does to say, ‘That person is my very best friend in the world.'”

Rowling is about to say goodbye to a very good friend: Half-Blood Prince is book six of a planned seven, and then that’s all she wrote. “I’ll be so sad to think I’ll never write a Harry-Ron-Hermione sentence again,” she says. But her feelings aren’t entirely unmixed. “Part of me will be glad when it’s over. Family life will become more normal. It will be a chance to write other things.”

Hang on–other things? It’s disconcerting to think of Rowling stepping out on Harry and the gang with another set of characters. But at least we can say Harry is Rowling’s last wizard. From here on out, it’s Muggles only. “I think I can say categorically that I will not write another fantasy after Harry,” she says, making herself and her publicists, who hover nearby, visibly nervous. “Wait, now I’m panicking. Oh, my God! Yes, I’m sure I can say that. I think I will have exhausted the possibilities of that. For me.” Beyond that, she isn’t giving away many clues, but she’s approaching the project with her usual ruthless skepticism. “We’ll have to see if it’s good enough to be published. I mean, that is a real concern, obviously, because the first thing I write post Harry could be absolutely dreadful, and, you know, people will buy it. So, you know, you’re left with this real insecurity.”

But future insecurities can wait. Rowling still has book seven to worry about. She has already started writing. “It will be a very different kind of book,” she says, “because I kind of cue up the shot at the end of six, and you’re left with a very clear idea of what Harry’s going to do next.”

“And,” she adds in an uncharacteristic moment of hubris, “it will be exciting!” Then she immediately retreats into self-deprecation. “You don’t know! You might read six and think, Ah, I won’t bother.”

But that, for once, is pure fantasy. Obviously.

Tradução: Miss Granger
Revisão: Adriana Snape

Couric, Katie. “J.K. Rowling, the author with the magic touch: ‘It’s going to be really emotional to say goodbye,’ says Rowling as she writes the last book in the Harry Potter saga,” Dateline NBC, July 17, 2005

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND— It seems like yesterday, he was a lonely unwanted orphan stuck with his insufferable relatives on Privet Drive. Harry Potter, the pride of Hogwarts, has come a long way in the last seven years and so has his creator.

J.K. Rowling is celebrating the publication of her new book, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and this past weekend, here at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland, she met with some of her most rabid fans for a special reading. She also talked with us in a rare and exclusive interview about the latest adventures of the boy who lived.

J.K. Rowling: Harry has, I think, taken the view that they are now at war. He does become more battled hardened. He’s now ready to go out fighting. And he’s after revenge.

The literary juggernaut known as Harry Potter continued to cast its spell on wizard wanna-be’s all weekend, as copies of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” flew off the shelves faster than a golden snitch.

For devoted fans, it meant the end of two long years of hankering for the new Harry. And for booksellers, it marked the publishing event of the year.

“It is also a moment of great celebration for reading and literacy,” said Barbara Marcus, executive vice president of Scholastic. “But behind all the excitement is the genius of J.K. Rowling.”

You might say J.K. (a.k.a. Jo) Rowling is the author with the magic touch. That’s certainly what they were thinking at a Potter party Friday night, when she held a private reading, something she often does to launch a new book.

Only this time, it was followed by a kids-only Q&A.

Rowling: I love it. They ask the best questions, you know? They really know the books back to front. In fact it’s now reaching the point where I feel I should revise this kind of event. I’ve now produced six novels and I feel I should go back and read them all meticulously to make sure I know what’s going on. Because I have been caught out, people have asked me questions and I’ve—“What books are they in again? Who are you talking about?”

Call it “Hogwarts Heaven” for those chosen few aficionados, most of whom had won contests hunting for Harry’s most bewitched fans.

So needless to say, I felt privileged J.K. Rowling granted her only “Half-Blood Prince” television interview to a muggle like me.

Katie Couric: Not many adult journalists are being given this opportunity so I’m very, very flattered. And why have you decided to keep the number of grownups at a minimum?

Rowling: Mainly because I’ve just had a baby, to be totally honest with you. It’s pressure of time. I just couldn’t really fit a whole bunch of interviews into the, you know, the nursing schedule, so I just decided that I was going to try and focus on the kids this time.

The 39-year-old native of England and her Scottish husband, Neil Murray, have some kids of their own. They just had their second child together, and Jo has one older daughter from a previous marriage.

Rowling: And we’ve got a mad dog as well that your crew met earlier.

Jo says her growing family has given her new perspective, and made writing more of a labor of love.

Rowling: I took a break, as you may remember, between the end of “Goblet” and “Phoenix.” And then since I started writing again, I have to say I’ve absolutely love it. But I am pacing myself a little better.

Couric: How are you doing it differently?

Rowling: I think that emotionally, I’ve probably felt a little bit more balanced when I started writing again. And, although, life was actually fuller because I got married again and was pregnant for most of the writing of “Phoenix.” I was almost pregnant for most of the writing —in fact for all of the writing of…

Couric: Maybe pregnancy makes you more creative.

Rowling: Well, I was also pregnant while writing “Philosopher’s Stone” so actually half of my novelistic output has been done while pregnant, so.

Couric: So maybe you shouldn’t stop having babies.

Rowling: No, really Katie, I think we’ll stop here. That’s not a good enough reason.

Her publisher may disagree. Not including this newest novel, the wildly popular series about the sensational but shy, young wizard has sold some 270 million books in 62 languages, even Braille, turning a generation of couch potatoes onto the lost art of reading.

Couric: You ever get mobbed by throngs of 11-year-olds?

Rowling: The most embarrassing one was last year. I was in a café in Edinburgh, and I got up and I went into the ladies room, and I heard a whole lot of people come into the bathroom and a lot of whispering. Didn’t really think about it. Came out of the cubicle to find about 11 teenage girls all standing holding bits of paper. And you really don’t want to be ambushed in that situation preferably. So that one was, I mean, they were they were adorable. But I would have preferred them to wait while I was out of the ladies room. Call me prudish.

And this seven year phenomenon shows no sign of waning.

“Half-Blood Prince” is expected to out-sell the fastest selling hardback in history, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”

“Harry Potter five was the largest product release ever in the history of Amazon.com,” says Jan Baker-Strand of Amazon.com. “And it was nearly double the size of Harry Potter four.”

That’s why for book six, Potter’s publisher, Scholastic, ordered a printing of 10.8 million copies, the largest first printing of any book ever.

Couric: You’ve said the opening chapter of this book has been brewing in your mind for 13 years.

Rowling: It has, yeah. You find out a lot more back story, really a lot. Harry finds out a lot more about the past which hopefully will be useful to him in the future. You see, I’m even measuring what I’m saying because I can see it written on fan sites, with them analyzing what I’ve just said, and thinking “What does this mean?” But you know, you could go a little bit mad.

Her paranoia is justified. Spoiler sites and stolen book pages have plagued previous installments. So, in the months leading up to book six’s release, binderies both home and abroad were forced to take extraordinary security measures to make sure Harry’s secrets were safe.

Couric: There were basically armed guards everywhere. People had to wear ID badges. And one employee joked that as of yet there had not been a body cavity search.

Rowling: No you wouldn’t want it in a body cavity. This is a big book.

Still, rumors were rampant the manuscript had leaked, especially after betting Web sites based in Britain were taking odds on whether or not Harry’s headmaster Dumbledore was doomed. For those of you who haven’t read the book yet, we won’t spill the beans.

Rowling: They think Dumbeldore’s a goner. Well, I will say that I have actually never said that a major character is going to die.

Couric: So it’s not true?

Rowling: I’m not saying that.

But even Jo couldn’t have conjured up this Potter plot: Last month, two men were arrested for allegedly trying to sell a stolen book to a British tabloid. British police confirm one of them was charged with possession of a firearm.

Couric: Do you ever feel like the world has gone mad?

Rowling: Has gone insane? Yeah, absolutely. I mean ultimately what is this? It’s a kid’s book. And I mean obviously it’s my life. I mean I’ve worked very hard on it. But 15 years ago, if someone had said “You know yeah, you’ll publish it, it will be popular, and they’ll be guns involved.” I think it’s just— it’s surreal isn’t it?

Meanwhile, Rowling’s money keeps… well, rolling in.

Never mind the books, the first three Harry Potter movies have grossed over $2.5 billion. And the fourth film, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” comes to theaters this fall.

Couric: I know that you’re very modest about your success. On the other hand, I read, Jo, that you are one of four self-made female billionaires in the world—

Rowling: Billionaires?

Couric: No, is that wrong?

Rowling: It’s okay— well— You feel really sorry for me, I’m not a billionaire, what a tragedy.

Couric: Well—

Rowling: No, this about that figure came from Forbes Magazine.

Couric: Right.

Rowling: And I have been told that they are speculating on all possible future earnings, all past earnings. And, frankly, they’re adding figures together that don’t exist. So I am not a billionaire. I’ve got plenty of money, more money than I ever dreamed I would have. But I am not a billionaire.

Couric: So the b-word does not apply?

Rowling: No, not at all. But if we assume that they’ve inflated the other women similarly. So, you know, relatively speaking, I’m doing okay.

But Rowling hasn’t forgotten what is was like before she became synonymous with fame and fortune— less than a decade ago, when the only checks coming in to her house were welfare checks.

Rowling: Last year, when I was pregnant with Mackenzie, Neil and I were on the other side of Edinburgh. And we were very near the flat in which I finished writing “Philosopher’s Stone.” I hadn’t been back there since I had left it and moved to a new house. And I said to Neil, “Let’s go around the corner, this is where I used to live.”

And when I clapped eyes on the place, I burst into tears. I couldn’t stop crying. For a moment, I was back where I had been all those years ago. It brought back this tidal wave of emotion. And I think it hit me so hard how life had changed. And in all respects, how wonderful it was.

And I’m standing there and I’m looking at this place and I’m thinking, it was almost like, I would see the ghost of myself standing in the window and I would be able to communicate to that person, “It’s all going to be okay. You know, you’re working so hard, and it will be okay. And it will be more than okay, it will be fabulous.” I will never forget how it felt to go back there.

While Rowling understands everyone loves a rags-to-riches story, she says “happily ever after” is not automatically her epilogue.

Rowling: This was something that I always had difficulty with expressing when it had all just happened to me, and everyone wanted my emotions to be very simple. They wanted me to say, “I was poor and I was unhappy, and now I’ve got money and I’m really happy.” And it’s what we all want to see when the quiz winner wins the big prize, you know. You want to see some jumping up and down, for everything to be very uncomplicated. The fact is, I was living a very pure life. There was no press involvement, there was no pressure. Life was very pure and it became more complicated.

Jo told us, she’s already begun writing book seven— the one in which she will bring the Harry Potter saga to its climactic end.

Couric: If you, God forbid, got hit by a bus…

Rowling: Yeah, it’s perfectly possible, I’m a very distracted person.

Couric: Does anybody know your ideas for book seven?

Rowling: No.

Couric: Nobody? Not a soul?

Rowling: No.

Couric: Not Neil?

Rowling: I wouldn’t tell— Neil would forget. You know, he wouldn’t be a good person to tell anyway. No, no one knows. Which is good, because if I do get hit by a bus, I would really hate to think someone else was going to take over. It’s my baby.

And as she looks forward to a literary life beyond Harry Potter, Jo says she will savor her final journey aboard the Hogwarts Express.

Couric: When you finish it, and obviously you have a lot of work ahead of you, are you going to be sad or—

Rowling: Yeah. It’s going to be really emotional to say goodbye. I’m going to find it very difficult. But it must be done, it must be done. It’s been a fabulous ride, but you have to know when to get off, and I know when to get off, and it will be the end of book seven.

Couric: Terrifying, though, to think about what you’ll do next—

Rowling: No, liberating. Definitely. Yeah. It is. The world is my oyster. I can do whatever I like.

Watch more of Katie Couric’s interview with J.K. Rowling, Monday morning, on the “Today” show.
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive

© 2005 MSNBC.com

Tradução: Sammy
Revisão: Adriana Snape

Coad, Emma. One-on-one interview with J.K. Rowling, ITV, 17 July 2005

Transcript by Deborah Skinner

Emma: Why did you start writing the series?

JK: Well, the idea hit me on this train journey, when I was travelling from Manchester to London in England. And it just came out of nowhere, the idea of a boy who didn’t know he was a wizard and received a letter telling him he had a place at a wizards’ school, and from that lots of the plot that appears in the seven books evolved on that train journey, so that by the time I got off the train I was so excited at the idea of writing this book that I just couldn’t wait to get home, and that’s how it started.

Emma: What was the very first thing that inspired you to write the books?

JK: Well, I think that first idea was one that engaged me so much, it made me so excited about the possibilities of that plot, that it gave me the motivation to persevere with it. I think that most people, erm … it can be quite discouraging writing when you haven’t got a publishing deal, you’ve got to have a lot of faith in what you’re writing just to keep going and finishing the novel and I just love the story so much so that’s what kept me going really.

Emma: Are any of the characters in the story like some of the people you met at school or when you were a kid?

JK: Not, ummmm, not, not very obviously. I think, I think the exception would be I’ve often said Ron Weasley is a lot like a boy I was at school with called Sean, who is now obviously a grown man and he’s, he’s an…Ron isn’t really Sean. I mean they’re not the same, but I noticed as I wrote Philosopher’s Stone, the first book, that he sounded like Sean and that certainly wasn’t a coincidence. Some of his humour is very Sean-ish.

Emma: Do you think you’ll be writing more books featuring some of the other characters from the Harry Potter series, like Snape and what he did before?

JK: I don’t think so, no, I’m pretty sure I won’t. My feeling is that I planned the, this series as a seven book series, that in book seven I think your questions will be answered. People will always have a few unanswered questions that they wonder, things about the characters and those things will probably be answered in fan fiction, you know, people get a lot of enjoyment writing their own stories about my characters and good luck to them. If they enjoy it then that’s fantastic, and some of it’s very good!

Emma: [Question unintelligible]

JK: Yeah, definitely. I think we’ve all met people like Draco Malfoy. In fact, nearly every reader of your age I’ve ever met has said ‘I know someone just like Draco Malfoy’ and sometimes it’s a girl. Many of my hopes and fears are Harry’s hopes and fears, in that we all want to just, we’re anxious about the same kind of things, although we’d rarely admit it. So we’re anxious about fitting in, we’re anxious about coping with work and we’re anxious about friendships and being made fun of and all of these things. Sometimes you want to be different, sometimes you want to be just like everyone else. So I think Harry goes through all of those things.

So I was very influenced by … I was also influenced by fantasies I’d had in my childhood. I had a fantasy about flying horses and a flying coach and eventually I used that in Goblet of Fire, as you know.

Emma: How do you think of the names in all the books like Gringotts and Hogwarts?

JK: Erm, Gringotts, really, I think, came from Ingots. you know you get ingots of gold, those bars? So I just liked the sound of it, so to me it sounded, ‘gr’ words can sound quite aggressive or quite, erm, or even sinister. So I really combined Gringotts. I just thought it sounded that little bit intimidating, but it had that allusion to gold in it.

Hogwarts, I always wanted Hog to be there, for some reason. I messed around with various different versions of Hogwarts until I settled on Hogwarts. I like it. I think it sounds comical and inviting at the same time. So you think about words like that and you try lots of different things and then suddenly one fits and you’re happy with it.

Emma: What one spell would you like to bring to life and why?

JK: Ooh, there are so many, aren’t there? So many. Erm, I think for me there … the outstanding spell is ‘Expecto Patronum’, and you know what that does don’t you? It creates the Patronus, it creates a kind of spirit guardian in a way. And that’s partly because of what it does. It’s the protector, and you could protect yourself and other people that you cared about with a Patronus, but it’s also because it’s such a beautiful spell. you know, the image of the silver Patronus emerging from a wand. I really like that.

Emma: How do you keep inspired as there be so much pressure on you trying to make each nook better than/of the one before it?

JK: Well there is pressure but I’m lucky in that I planned all the books so long ago now that, erm, I can’t really be deflected by much. I mean, I know what I’ve got to do next. It would be much harder if I didn’t really know what the next book would be about and I had a lot of pressure on me to as you say, make it good or make it exciting and I was sitting there think ‘Oh God, *gasps*, what do I make him do this time?’ well, luckily for me, my plans are there and I know what he’s going to do next time, so I really just have to sit down and do the whole book and make it into a book.

Emma: Will Harry and Hermione start dating, or will it be Ron and Hermione?

JK: What do you think?
Emma: Harry and Hermione.

JK: You will get more clues on that in this book (indicates HBP). In fact you’ll half of it, half of your answer is will come in this book.

Emma: Do you ever get writers’ block?

JK: Very, very, very rarely.

Emma: Really?

JK: Yeah, Erm, I once..I think I’ve only actually had one case of what I would call true writers’ block, and that was during the writing of Chamber of Secrets, and that was related entirely to the fact that Philosopher’s Stone had a lot of success which really took me aback and temporarily paralysed me so I didn’t…I was just plain scared I think, you know, I thought ‘I can’t keep this up, I can never keep this going’. I felt very insecure an very frightened by what was happening around me and that got me temporarily. And I can’t now remember how long that lasted for, I think a couple of weeks. That’s a very long time for someone like me, who writes pretty easily on a day-to-day basis.

Emma: Do you enjoy going to the movies to see your books come to life?

JK: I do enjoy it. It’s a funny feeling. One of the most disturbing feelings, and yet wonderful as well, was the first time I visited the film set. They were showing me around the set, just incredible, and there were two things. I walked into the great hall, and I’d drawn the director, Chris Columbus, sort of a rough diagram of how I saw the great hall and we’d really discussed, and the production design manager had just done the most astonishingly good job, and that felt like walking into my own head. I just walked into this place that I had imagined for so long and there it was and it really looked exactly as I imagined it and it was astonishing. And then later that day they showed me the chamber where Quirrell faces Harry at the end of Philosopher’s Stone, and there was a spooky, spooky moment when I was stood in front of the Mirror of Erised seeing myself, of course, exactly as I am — and you know what that means in the book. And so I was seeing myself as a successful, published author. Wow, so that was a very, almost embarrassingly symbolic moment, you can imagine.

Emma: Did you ever expect your books to be so popular with adults and children?

JK: No, I, I never dreamed that I would be where I am now, it’s just been incredible. I never dreamt that people would like the book so much. Erm, I often get asked the question about adults and all I can say in that is that I … I … I write these books and I don’t sit down and think ‘right, now what would an eight year old like to read and what would a twelve year old like?’ I really do write what I’d quite like to read. So from that point of view it doesn’t surprise me that other adults like them because I’m an adult, obviously, and I like them, but the scale of it obviously, is breathtaking.

Emma: the story seems to be drawing to a close, how will you feel when the books actually stop?

JK: I’ll have very mixed feelings, because, I’ll certainly have a big sense of loss and it will almost be like a bereavement because I’ve been living with Harry since 1990, so it’s 15 years so far and that’s a very, very long time to be with anyone and certainly longer than a lot of marriages, so it’s, erm, that’ll be painful, the idea that I won’t write about him anymore. On the other hand, you’ve just mentioned there is a certain amount of pressure that comes with being the writer of Harry Potter, and it would be nice to write something without any of that pressure. Although, I don’t really feel the pressure when I’m writing Harry Potter, then at some point I have to emerge from writing the book and then I really, I feel the weight of it a little bit. Erm, so there are things connected with the whole world of Harry Potter that I won’t miss so much.

Emma: What is your favourite wizards’ sweet?

JK: Oh, my favourite wizards’ sweet? I have a very soft place in my heart for Cockroach cluster. I enjoyed inventing that and yeah, I do like that!

Emma: What makes a good writer?

JK: Oooh, there’s a question. Erm, many many many different things make a good writer. For me, I like books but, erm, if you combine characters that you care about with a really intriguing story than I think, then you’ve generally got something I’d like to read. So, those are things I appreciate in other writers. Erm, but I like a number of very different writers and you could find very few things that they had in common, so it’s one of those…it’s so subjective because your favourite writer, someone else would loathe.