A biography for Roald Dahlhasn’t been written yet.
“It's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself”
“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”
“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 were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous anymore.”
“Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.”
“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.”
“Did they preach one thing and practice another, these men of God?”
“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.”
“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.”
“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.”
“I'm afraid men are not always quite as clever as they think they are. You will learn that when you get a bit older, my girl.”
“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.”
“Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!”
“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 India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”
“Life is more fun if you play games.”
“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.”
“It is most unlikely. But--here comes the big "but"--not impossible.”
“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.”
“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.”
“She resented being told constantly that she was stupid, when she knew she wasn't.”