Roald Dahl Quotes

I love it when my books cause controversy, when people argue violently about the ending.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it.

Literature has become my life.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

I have read your book and much like it.

No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.

It's a novel experience to have one of my books read by a reading group.

As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.

My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

I always try to treat the book itself as the artwork. I don't want you to stop while you're reading one of my books and say, 'Oh! What a gorgeous illustration!' I want you to stop at the end of the book and say, 'This is a good book.

Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Why do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don't care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author's cruelty. And the reader's sympathy...it takes a mean author to write a good story.

Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.

A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.

I have no liking for novels or stories - none in the world; and so, whenever I read one - which is not oftener than once in two years, and even in these same cases I seldom read beyond the middle of the book - my distaste for the vehicle always taints my judgment of the literature itself, as a matter of course; and also of course makes my verdict valuless. Are you saying "You have written stories yourself." Quite true: but the fact that an Indian likes to scalp people is no evidence that he likes to be scalped.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

I don't want to write things that people don't want to read. I would have no pleasure in producing something that sold 600 copies but that was considered very wonderful. I would prefer to sell 20,000 copies because the readers loved it. When I write books I don't actually think about the market in that way. I just tell myself the story. I don't think I'm talking to a 10-year-old boy or a six-year-old girl. I just write on the level the story seems to call for.

When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.