Quotes by Roald Dahl

A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY

She resented being told constantly that she was stupid, when she knew she wasnt.

Truth is more important than modesty

Its impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you arent feeling twinkly yourself

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. 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. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. 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.

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.

You mean you live down here? Matilda asked.I do, Miss Honey replied, but she said no more.Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again.

All grown-ups appear as giants to small children. But Headmasters (and policemen) are the biggest giants of all and acquire a marvellously exaggerated stature.

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

A bad girl is a far more dangerous thing than a bad boy.

I want an Oompa-Loompa! screamed Veruca.

My darling, she said at last, are you sure you dont mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?I dont mind at all I said.It doesnt matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.

Thank goodness we dony meet many people like [Miss Trunchbull] in this world, although they do exist and all of us are likely to come across at least one of them in a lifetime. If you ever do, you should behave as you would if you met an enraged rhinoceros out in the bush--climb up the nearest tree and stay there until it has gone away.

We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want - or near enough.

What sort of a book would you like to read next? she asked.

Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything. Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first. And maybe that is what I did. I dreamed about coming here, but then I did it.

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

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

“It doesnt matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.”

“We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want - or near enough.”