Quotes by Roald Dahl
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
'Dexter' is a very well-oiled machine; it's just a great show and great to be part of.
If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important.
I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.
I learned to speak Swahili and to shake the scorpions out of my mosquito boots in the mornings. I learned what it was like to get malaria and to run a temperature of 105 degrees for three days.
None of us, even on the sunniest days in 1934, went without his furled umbrella. The umbrella was our badge of office. We felt naked without it.
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.
Game-playing at school is always fun if you happen to be good at it, and it is hell if you are not. I was one of the lucky ones.
When I was 2, we moved into an imposing country mansion 8 miles west of Cardiff, Wales.
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.
An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.
Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more.
I was 20 years old. I was off to East Africa, where I would walk about in khaki shorts every day and wear a topi on my head.
The sweet-shop in Llandaff in the year 1923 was the very centre of our lives. TO us, it was what a bar is to a drunk. Without it, there would have been little to live for.
It was always a great surprise to me that I was good at games. One of these was called fives, and the other was squash-racquets.
To shipbrokers, coal was black gold.
Did they preach one thing and practice another, these men of God?
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.
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.
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.
There is nothing wrong with a few quick sharp tickles on the rump. They probably do a naughty boy a lot of good.
