Top 201 Quotes & Sayings by Roald Dahl

Did they preach one thing and practice another, these men of God?

All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely.

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

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.

Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.

Had I not had children of my own, I would have never written books for children, nor would I have been capable of doing so.

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.

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.

I go down to my little hut, where it's tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.

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

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.

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.

The Bristol Channel was always my guide, and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. It was a great comfort.

To shipbrokers, coal was black gold.

Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset.

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

'Dexter' is a very well-oiled machine; it's just a great show and great to be part of.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers.

Prayers were held in Assembly Hall. We all perched in rows on wooden benches while teachers sat up on the platform in armchairs, facing us.

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

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.

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.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

Pear Drops were exciting because they had a dangerous taste. All of us were warned against eating them, and the result was that we ate them more than ever.

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

When I was 2, we moved into an imposing country mansion 8 miles west of Cardiff, Wales.

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.

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.

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

I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible.

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.

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.

The more risks you allow your children to make, the better they learn to look after themselves.

It's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself

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 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 at 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

Kindness - that simple word. To be kind - it covers everything, to my mind. If you're kind that's it.

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

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.

We make realities out of our dreams and dreams out of our realities. We are the dreamers of the dream.

If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.

A little magic can take you a long way.

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

Don't gobblefunk around with words.

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.

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.

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

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

You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that.

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

I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile, because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it, so watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you with his mouth but the eyes stay the same. It's sure to be bogus.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you'll be free if you truly wish to be.