A biography for Joanne Harrishasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.”
“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.”
“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.”
“For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes.”
“A black cat crossed my path, and I stopped to dance around it widdershins and to sing the”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I can write absolutely anywhere. All I need is a laptop.”
“I am fascinated by how people eat and what it reveals about them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A little tantrum in real life seems so much bigger online.”
“If you want to know what's important to a culture, learn their language.”
“I have an advanced degree in procrastination and another one in paranoia.”
“I find littering very annoying. It's a minor but also a major thing: a society that litters is one that also has so little respect for the environment and, consequently, other people. If we had clean streets, a lot of other things would be fixed almost effortlessly.”