Roald Dahl Best Quotes & Sayings

An idiotic vitch like you
Must rrroast upon the barbecue! — Roald Dahl

There is little point in teaching anything backwards. The whole object of life, Headmistress, is to go forwards. — Roald Dahl

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

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

I think you is barking up the wrong dog. — Roald Dahl

Frobscottle is sweet and jumbly! — Roald Dahl

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

Twenty-four feet is puddlenuts in Giant Country. — Roald Dahl

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. — Roald Dahl

Mum just laughed gleefully at his mounting frustration, like the villainous matriarch in a Roald Dahl story. I suspect a TV guide would describe her idea of comedy as 'dark', or, at very best, 'alternative'. — Matthew Crow

What a lot of hairy-faced men there are around nowadays. — Roald Dahl

A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying. — Lev Grossman

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

This is Mr. Bucket. This is Mrs. Bucket. Mr. and Mrs. Bucket have a small boy whose name is Charlie Bucket. — Roald Dahl

There are no strangers in here, just friends you haven't met ... — Roald Dahl

He should have burped," Charlie said. "Of course he should have burped," said Mr. Wonka. "I stood there shouting, 'Burp, you silly ass, burp, or you'll never come down again! But he didn't or couldn't or wouldn't, I don't know which. Maybe he was too polite. He must be on the moon by now." On the next door, it said, SQUARE CANDIES THAT LOOK ROUND. — Roald Dahl

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. — Roald Dahl

*Life is a series of thousands of tiny miracles. Notice them.
*No book ever ends when it's full of friends. — Roald Dahl

Rainbow drops - suck them and you can spit in six different colours. — Roald Dahl

For whipping cream, of course. How can you whip cream without whips? — Roald Dahl

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. — Roald Dahl

I've always liked the classic "young adult" writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens. They write so clearly, and they know how to entertain. — Arthur Bradford

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

When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process. — Roald Dahl

And when I protested a bit more, I remember he said, 'My dear Lady Ponsonby, there's nothing immoral about this. Art is only immoral when practiced by amateurs. It's the same with medicine. You wouldn't refuse to undress before your doctor, would you? — Roald Dahl

Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets. — Roald Dahl

You mean you live down here?' Matilda asked.
'I do', Miss Honey replied, but she said no more.
Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again. — Roald Dahl

This Giant had some sort of magic in his legs. — Roald Dahl

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

Words," he said, "is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. — Roald Dahl

I loved reading Roald Dahl when I was young but I had forgotten a lot about the books. I read the 'BFG' on the iPad the other day and it was so interesting to see his descriptions of clothes and places. — Frank Lampard

Their skin hung loose over their bodies like suits they had inherited from larger ancestors, with the trousers ridiculously baggy. — Roald Dahl

Thank goodness we don'y meet many people like [Miss Trunchbull] in this world, although they do exist and all of us are likely to come across at least one of them in a lifetime. If you ever do, you should behave as you would if you met an enraged rhinoceros out in the bush
climb up the nearest tree and stay there until it has gone away. — Roald Dahl

I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like. — Roald Dahl

My earliest, most impactful encounter with a book was when I was seven and awoke early on Christmas morning to find Roald Dahl's 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' in my stocking. I had never been so excited by the sight of a book - and have possibly never been since! — Sophie Kinsella

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