Roald Dahl > Quotes

“Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honourable and intelligent. The fact that they were none of these things was something she had to put up with. It was not easy to do so. But the new game she had invented of punishing one or both of them each time they were beastly to her made her life more or less bearable. Being very small and very young, the only power Matilda had over anyone in her family was brain-power. For sheer cleverness she could run rings around them all. But the fact remained that any five-year-old girl in any family was always obliged to do as she was told, however asinine the orders might be.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY”
― Roald Dahl, Danny the Champion of the World

“So the music is saying something to them. It is sending a message. I do not think the human beans is knowing what that message is, but they is loving it just the same.”
― Roald Dahl, The BFG

“There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You'll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there's a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There'll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose."
Where?"
In the 'word-memory' section," he said, epexegetically.”
― Roald Dahl, The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl

“Don’t argue, my dear child, please don’t argue!” cried Mr. Wonka. “It’s such a waste of precious time!”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“Do you wonder then that this man’s behaviour used to puzzle me tremendously? He was an ordinary clergyman at that time as well as being Headmaster, and I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and all the rest of it and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.
So what was it all about? I used to ask myself.
Did they preach one thing and practise another, these men of God?
And if someone had told me at the time that this flogging clergyman was one day to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never have believed it.
It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.”
― Roald Dahl, Boy: Tales of Childhood

“What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself. Nobody has ever had such a lovely time as this!”
― Roald Dahl, Going Solo

“It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“You can write about anything for children as long as you've got humour.”
― Roald Dahl, The Witches

“A message To the children who have read this book. When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important. A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants -and DESERVES- is a parent who is SPARKY!" - Danny, the champion of the world.”
― Roald Dahl , Danny the Champion of the World

“Perhaps his anger was intensified because he saw her getting pleasure from something that was beyond his reach.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“Oh, my sainted aunt! Don't mention that disgusting stuff in front of me! Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“... and when he put his mind to it, he could make his words coil themselves around and around the listener until they held her in some sort of a mild hypnotic spell.”
― Roald Dahl, Switch Bitch

“I therefore invite you all," Mr Fox went on, 'to stay here with me for ever.'
For ever!' they cried. 'My goodness! How marvellous!' And Rabbit said to Mrs Rabbit, 'My dear, just think! We're never going to be shot again in our lives!'
We will make,' said Mr Fox, 'a little underground village, with streets and houses on each side - seperate houses for Badgers and Moles and Rabbits and Weasels and Foxes. And every day I will go shopping for you all. And every day we will eat like kings.'
The cheering that followed this speech went on for many minutes.”
― Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr. Fox

“You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

“Mr Hemingway says a lot of things I don’t understand, Matilda said to her. 'Especially about men and women. But I loved it all the same. The way he tells it I feel I am right there on the spot watching it all happen.' 'A fine writer will always make you feel that,' Mrs Phelps said . 'And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“You are still yourself in everything except your appearance. You've still got your own mind and your own brain and your own voice, and thank goodness for that.”
― Roald Dahl, The Witches

“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.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“Give us strength, oh Lord, to let our children starve.”
― Roald Dahl, The Great Automatic Grammatizator And Other Stories

“The books gave Matilda a comforting message: You are not alone." -Matilda”
― Roald Dahl

“Those who don't believe in magic will never find it”
― Roald Dahl

“She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“And it was then I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side, which comes out in him only after he has closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over and he finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of trance, and everything around me disappears. I see only the point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as though they were a couple of seconds.”
― Roald Dahl, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

“Titchy little snapperwhippers like you should not be higgling around with an old sage and onions who is hundreds of years more than you.”
― Roald Dahl, The BFG

“For me, the pleasure of writing comes with inventing stories.”
― Roald Dahl, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

“I is not understanding human beans at all,’ the BFG said. ‘You is a human bean and you is saying it is grizzling and horrigust for giants to be eating human beans. Right or left?’ ‘Right,’ Sophie said. ‘But human beans is squishing each other all the time,’ the BFG said. ‘They is shootling guns and going up in aerioplanes to drop their bombs on each other’s heads every week. Human beans is always killing other human beans.’ He was right. Of course he was right and Sophie knew it. She was beginning to wonder whether humans were actually any better than giants.”
― Roald Dahl, The BFG

“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.”
― Roald Dahl, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

“I like enthusiasts of any kind.”
― Roald Dahl, My Year

“I libri le aprivano mondi nuovi e le facevano conoscere persone straordinarie che vivevano una vita piena di avventure. Viaggiava su antichi velieri con Joseph Conrad. Andava in Africa con Ernest Hemingway e in India con Kipling. Girava il mondo restando seduta nella sua stanza, in un villaggio inglese.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda