“When a child… discovers his own imagination, he suddenly walks into a new life. …seeing situations that do not exist. …in part as fantasy, and in part as a quite rational exploration of future experiences. …play …frolics in the fantasy world, and it experiments in the rational world… They project themselves into all worlds, possible and impossible, and discover for themselves the knife-edge boundary between them.”

As quoted in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 146, no. 1, (March 2002), p. 115

Strange Horizons interview (2004)

It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider https://books.google.com/books?id=IiKY1H0A_QEC&pg=PT102 (Hyperion, 2005).
Cf. Wisdom from It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider https://books.google.com/books?id=EEiqMIgAl3UC&pg=PA49 (White Plains, N. Y.: Peter Pauper Press, Inc., 2007), p. 49.

Source: Scandal in Spring

The Idiot (1868–9)
Context: It wasn't the New World that mattered … Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all. But what's the use of talking! I suspect that all I'm saying now is so like the usual commonplaces that I shall certainly be taken for a lower-form schoolboy sending in his essay on "sunrise", or they'll say perhaps that I had something to say, but that I did not know how to "explain" it. But I'll add, that there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas. But if I too have failed to convey all that has been tormenting me for the last six months, it will, anyway, be understood that I have paid very dearly for attaining my present "last conviction." This is what I felt necessary, for certain objects of my own, to put forward in my "Explanation". However, I will continue.

Source: There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

As quoted in "Success of Harry Potter bowls author over" at CNN.com (21 October 1999) http://www.cnn.com/books/news/9910/21/rowling.intvu/; also quoted in "Urban Legends Reference Pages : Harry Potter" at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/potter.asp
1990s
Context: I absolutely did not start writing these books to encourage any child into witchcraft. … I'm laughing slightly because to me, the idea is absurd.
I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, "Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch." They see it for what it is... It is a fantasy world and they understand that completely.

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

pg 27.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])