Quotes by Roald Dahl

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.

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

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

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

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.

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

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

— Roald Dahl

Life

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.

— Roald Dahl

Life

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

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

— Roald Dahl

Freedom

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.

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

To shipbrokers, coal was black gold.

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

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.

— Roald Dahl

Education

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.

— Roald Dahl

Courage

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.

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

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.

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

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.

— Roald Dahl

Success

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.

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

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

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

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

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.

— Roald Dahl

Life

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.

— Roald Dahl

Life

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.

— Roald Dahl

Happiness

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.

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom

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

— Roald Dahl

Love

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.

— Roald Dahl

Courage

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.

— Roald Dahl

Wisdom