Roald Dahl Quotes

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

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.

No book ever ends, when it’s full of your friends.

I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt.

When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books.

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.

I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.

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.

My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it.

When I walked to school in the mornings I would start out alone but would pick up four other boys along the way. We would set out together after school across the village green.

All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can’t swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

A life is made up of a great number of small incidents, and a small number of great ones.

And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.