“This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter.  I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H.White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn’t develop it.  I was the first to do that.  Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines.  She didn’t plagiarize.  She didn’t copy anything.  Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything.  The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers.  When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so.  This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.“