Roald Dahl
If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.Collection: Years
No book ever ends, when it's full of your friends.Collection: Book
Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.Collection: Childhood
If I had my way, I'd remove January from the calendar altogether and have an extra July instead.Collection: July
We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.Collection: Inspirational
Some people when they have taken too much and have been driven beyond the point of endurance, simply crumble and give up. There are others, though they are not many, who will for some reason always be unconquerable. You meet them in time of war and also in time of peace. They have an indomitable spirit and nothing, neither pain nor torture nor threat of death, will cause them to give up.Collection: Giving Up
If my books can help children become readers then I feel I have accomplished something important.Collection: Children
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.Collection: Reading
So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.Collection: Strong
Two rights don't equal a left.Collection: Rights
A Message to Children Who Have Read This Book - When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY.Collection: Children
There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you'll be free if you truly wish to be.Collection: Imagination
Sex is like nose picking. It's fine as long as you practice it yourself, but it's disgusting watching someone else doing it.Collection: Sex
My dear young fellow,' the Old-Green-Grasshopper said gently, 'there are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet.Collection: World
By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.Collection: Writing
The Alexander Technique works... I recommend it enthusiastically to anyone who has neck pains or back pain.Collection: Pain
When you're old enough to write a book for children, by then you'll have become a grown up and have lost all your jokeyness. Unless you're an undeveloped adult and still have an enormous amount of childishness in you.Collection: Children
Matilda said, "Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable.Collection: Crazy
Mr. Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And, now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever.Collection: Age
Life is more fun if you play games.Collection: Fun
I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable, but I'm gonna ignore your advice.Collection: Advice
...the more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys should be allowed to climb tall trees and walk along the tops of high walls and dive into the sea from high rocks... The same with girls. I like the type of child who takes risks. Better by far than the one who never does so.Collection: Girl
I regard each sentence as a little wheel... Now and again I try to put a really big one next to a very small one in such a way that the big one, turning slowly, will make the small one spin so fast that it hums. Very tricky, that.Collection: Trying
Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful.Collection: Book
All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.Collection: Reading
The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman.Collection: Hell
There is something about very cold weather that gives one an enormous appetite. Most of us find ourselves beginning to crave rich steaming stews and hot apple pies and all kinds of delicious warming dishes; and because we are all a great deal luckier than we realize, we usually get what we want—or near enough.Collection: Weather
The matter with human beans," the BFG went on, "is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles.Collection: Believe
If you are good life is good.Collection: Good Life
I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.Collection: Children
The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.Collection: Giving
The prime function of the children's book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it. And that first love affair between the young child and the young book will lead hopefully to other loves for other books and when that happens the battle is probably won. The child will have found a crock of gold. He will also have gained something that will help to carry him most marvelously through the tangles of his later years. Roald DahlCollection: Beautiful
I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.Collection: Hate
I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I'll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else. Brian Sibley: Or brains even? Oh gosh, yes, brains is one of the least. You can be a lovely person without brains, absolutely lovely. Kindness - that simple word. To be kind - it covers everything, to my mind. If you're kind that's it.Collection: Kindness
Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!Collection: Food
Whipped cream isn't whipped cream at all if it hasnt been whipped with whips, just like poached eggs isn't poached eggs unless it's been stolen in the dead of the night.Collection: Night
She might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look carefully at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don't let that put you off. It could be part of cleverness. I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But--here comes the big "but"--not impossible.Collection: Teacher
When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things [...] The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process.Collection: Book
Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don't know how awful it is unti you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die.Collection: Want
A BOOK?! WHAT D'YOU WANNA FLAMING BOOK FOR?...WE'VE GOT A LOVELY TELLY WITH A 12-INCH SCREEN AND NOW YA WANNA BOOK!Collection: Book
The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.Collection: Children
Never mind about 1066 William the Conqueror, 1087 William the Second. Such things are not going to affect one?s life...but 1932 the Mars Bar and 1936 Maltesers and 1937 the Kit Kat - these dates are milestones in history and should be seared into the memory of every child in the country.Collection: Country
I've heard tell that what you imagine sometimes comes true. -Grandpa JoeCollection: Grandpa
Meanings is not important, said the BFG. I cannot be right all the time. Quite often I is left instead of right.Collection: Important
Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!Collection: Powerful
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.Collection: Book
The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by.Collection: Ideas
Candy is dandy but liqueur is quicker.Collection: Candy