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Roald Dahl Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database

Quotes from Roald Dahl


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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.


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.


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


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.


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


The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.


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


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


To shipbrokers, coal was black gold.


An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.


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.


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.