17 Quotes by Roald Dahl to reflect on

Today I thought it would be interesting to explore some quotes by Roald Dahl.

Roald Dahl was born in Wales to affluent Norwegian immigrant parents and spent most of his life in England. He served in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War.

He is best known worldwide as a novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter and his books have sold more than 250 million copies globally.

Roald Dahl has been called one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century. He rose to prominence as a writer in the 1940s with works for children and for adults, and he became one of the world’s best-selling authors.

His works for children include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG, The Twits, George’s Marvellous Medicine and Danny, the Champion of the World.

His works for older audiences include the short story collections Tales of the Unexpected and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More.

Given his success, his words are worthy of reflection. So, take a few moments to read these 17 quotes by Roald Dahl.

Quotes by Roald Dahl (1-10):

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
Did they preach one thing and practice another, these men of God?
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.
Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more.
If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important.
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.
The writer must force himself to work. He must make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.
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.
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.
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.

Quotes by Roald Dahl (11-17):

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.
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.
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.
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, and no moral sense at all.
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 must use characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books.
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.

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