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.

I devised a stunt for getting myself sent back home. My idea was that I should all of a sudden develop an attack of acute appendicitis.

If you are good life is good.

Truth is more important than modesty

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 life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go...

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.

Some children are spoiled and it is not their fault, it is their parents.

It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

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.

It is most unlikely. But–here comes the big “but”–not impossible.

I’d rather be fried alive and eaten by Mexicans.

It’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself

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 writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky...

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

Some adults forget what it was like to be a kid,” Burton says.

…the more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys...

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.

Ik heb gemerkt, juffrouw Engel, in mijn lange loopbaan in het onderwijs, dat een rotmeisje veel gevaarlijker is dan een rotjongen. Bovendien zijn ze veel moeilijker klein te krijgen. Een rotmeisje te grazen nemen is...

A whizzpopper!” cried the BFG, beaming at her. “Us giants is making whizzpoppers all the time! Whizzpopping is a sign of happiness. It is music in our ears! You surely is not telling me that...

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

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.