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

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...

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

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to...

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

And Charlie, don’t forget about what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted. He lived happily ever after. – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.

The matter with human beans,” the BFG went on, “is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles.

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

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed...

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.

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.

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...

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 began to realise that the large chocolate companies actually did possess inventing rooms, and they took their inventing very seriously.

So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.

You seemed so far away,” Miss Honey whispered, awestruck.”Oh, I was. I was flying past the stars on silver wings,” Matilda said. “It was wonderful.

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

Bunkum and tummyrot! You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates?...

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

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

I’m wondering what to read next.” Matilda said. “I’ve finished all the children’s books.

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...

We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it. – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!

We may see a Creature with forty-nine headsWho lives in the desolate snow,And whenever he catches a cold (which he dreads)He has forty-nine noses to blow.’We may see the venomous Pink-Spotted ScrunchWho can chew up...

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.

Don’t gobblefunk around with words.

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

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.

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.

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.

Game-playing at school is always fun if you happen to be good at it, and it is hell if you are not. I was one of the lucky ones.

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

You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These...

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long,...

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.

What sort of a book would you like to read next?” she asked.

Some people when they have taken too much and have been driven beyond the point of endurance, simply crumble and give up. There are others, though they are not many, who will for some reason...

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

Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don’t know how awful it is unti you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to...

I’m right and you’re wrong, I’m big and you’re small, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY

To shipbrokers, coal was black gold.

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it

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...

All the figures show that film-makers and publishers go for the safe option,” says Peter Hunt, children’s literature professor at Cardiff University.

The act of copulation is like that of picking the nose. It’s all right to be doing it yourself but it is a singularly unattractive spectacle for the onlooker.

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