510 Quotes by Roald Dahl

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

Shakespeare, daddy.” “Was he brainy?” “Very, daddy.” “He had masses of hair, did he?” “He was bald, daddy.” To which the father had snapped, “If you can’t talk sense then shut up.

The very rich are enormously resentful of bad weather. It is the one discomfort that their money cannot do anything about.

The secret of life’, he said, ‘is to become very very good at somethin’ that’s very very ’ard to do.

I don’t want a grown-up person at all. A grownup won’t listen to me; he won’t learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I have to have a child. I want a good sensible loving child, one to whom I can tell all my most precious candy-making secrets-while I am still alive.

The only sensible thing to do when you are attacked is, as Napoleon once said, to counter-attack.

Matilda said nothing. She simply sat there admiring the wonderful effect of her own handiwork. Mr Wormwood’s fine crop of black hair was now a dirty silver, the colour this time of a tightrope-walker’s tights that had not been washed for the entire circus season.

Poppyrot and pigwash!

Perhaps his anger was intensified because he saw her getting pleasure from something that was beyond his reach.