Roald Dahl

The secret of life', he said, 'is to become very very good at somethin' that's very very 'ard to do.

I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.

I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.

The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.

All you do is to look / At a page in this book / Because that's where we always will be. / No book ever ends / When it's full of your friends / The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

If my books can help children become readers then I feel I have accomplished something important.

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.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it's a disaster is a very, very fine line. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he's broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it's not a joke anymore.

The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

Some children are spoiled and it is not their fault, it is their parents.

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.

Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.

Good writing is essentially rewriting.

All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.

Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world.

It was slowly beginning to dawn upon Henry that nothing is any fun if you can get as much of it as you want. Especially money.

Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.