Quotes by Roald Dahl
A tuck-box is a small pinewood trunk which is very strongly made, and no boy has ever gone as a boarder to an English Prep School without one.
The summer holidays! The magic words! The mere mention of them used to send shivers of joy rippling over my skin.
Cadbury's were using some of the greatest chocolate-bar experts in the world to test out their new inventions. We knew every chocolate bar in existence.
I began to realise that the large chocolate companies actually did possess inventing rooms, and they took their inventing very seriously.
In 1920, with no penicillin or other magical antibiotic cures, pneumonia in particular was a very dangerous illness indeed.
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.
Everyone has some sort of a boat in Norway. NObody sits around in front of the hotel. Nor does anyone sit on the beach.
Great excitement is probably the only thing that really interests a 6-year-old boy.
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.
A Liquorice Bootlace is not round. It's like a flat tape about half an inch wide. You buy it rolled up in a coil.
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.
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.
Throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten.
The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs 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.
I devised a stunt for getting myself sent back home. My idea was that I should all of a sudden develop an attack of acute appendicitis.
When I was about 9, my ancient half-sister got engaged. The man of her choice was an English doctor. Romance was floating in the air like moondust.
Egypt was desert country. It was bare and sandy and full of tombs and relics and Egyptians, and I didn't fancy it at all.
On the way to school and on the way back we always passed the sweet-shop. We always stopped. We lingered outside its small window gazing in at the big glass jars.
Our family got ready for our first drive in the first motor-car we had ever owned. It was an enormous long black French automobile called a De Dion-Bouton which had a canvas roof that folded back.
Newfoundland was not much of a country. For three weeks we trudged all over that desolate land with enormous loads on our backs. We carried tents and sleeping bags and saucepans and food and axes.
The rules of Prep were simple but strict. You were forbidden to look up from your work, and you were forbidden to talk.
Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset.
I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible.
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.
