Roald Dahl Quotes

Give us strength, oh Lord, to let our children starve.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you
because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.
Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

But this was nothing compared with the sales of the blandest and most disgusting thing of all, the Creme Egg. Between Christmas and Easter, Cadbury sells 350 million of these fondant-filled horrors. I won't eat them. Nobody I know eats them. But somebody obviously does, by the bucketful.

Life is more fun if you play games.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

Listening to him... I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.

A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.

George couldn't help disliking Grandma. She was selfish grumpy old woman. She had pale brown teeth and a small pucker-up mouth like a dog's bottom.

I'll swish you to a swazzle! I'll swash you to a swizzle! I'll gnash you to a gnozzle! I'll gnosh you to a gnazzle!

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. [...] 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.

'...there's a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There'll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.'
'Where?'
'In the 'word-memory' section,' he said, epexegetically.

Bunkum and tummyrot! You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he'd said 'What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?' He wouldn't even have started.

If the Good Lord intended for us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates.

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.

"Words," he said, "is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life."

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.

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.

Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more.

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.