Roald Dahl Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.

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.

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.

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

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.