ROALD DAHL

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible.

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.

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 has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.

To shipbrokers, coal was black gold.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I go down to my little hut, where it's tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.

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

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.

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

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 knife.

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.

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

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.