We must talk about failure, says JK Rowling

Bestselling author JK Rowling knows success better than most. But she wishes she had been warned about failure, when she was younger.

"I don't think we talk about failure enough," Rowling recently said in an interview with a US network. "It would've really helped to have someone who had had a measure of success come say to me, 'You will fail. That's inevitable. It's what you do with it.'"

Before Rowling became one of the wealthiest women in the world, she was a single mom living off welfare in the UK. She began writing about her now-famous character, the young wizard Harry Potter, in Edinburgh cafés, and received many rejections from book publishers when she first sent out the manuscript.

Rowling previously addressed the subject of failure in a 2008 Harvard University commencement speech. Referring to her rough start, she said: "An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in Britain, without being homeless ... By every standard, I was the biggest failure I knew."

She went on to say that she considered her failure a "gift" that was "painfully won," since she gained knowledge about herself through the adversity.