Roald Dahl Quotes

When it comes to telling children stories, they don’t need simple language. They need beautiful language.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

I hope children will be happy with the books I've written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.

It's our job - as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles - to find books our kids are going to like.

If one can judge from the letters that I receive, it would seem that there are many thousands of children who would like me to speak or to read to them.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

I read to my children, and now they love to read. I encourage parents to carve out just 20 minutes a day. It helps you learn more about them, and really opens the door for you to speak into their life!

My mother was a children's librarian, and I was raised on lots of English children's literature. It gave me this weird idea that I was English.

Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at 'proper' books, which means books without pictures.

I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know. It was something I always did.

It's hard recommending books for kids, and a huge responsibility. If you get it wrong, they don't tell you they hate that particular book, they tell you they hate reading.

I hate the idea of any kid missing out on the magic of reading.

One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times.

I have always loved 'Stig of the Dump.' I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.

As a children's author, you get to advocate for reading and writing in general, in a way an adult author might not be able to. It's a really interesting dance we do to get literature into the hands of young people and to help them to become literate and become readers; we want them to grow up reading and continue to do so when they're adults.

A parent who from his own childhood experience is convinced of the value of fairy tales will have no difficulty in answering his child's questions; but an adult who thinks these tales are only a bunch of lies had better not try telling them; he won't be able to related them in a way which would enrich the child's life.

If you are writing children's books, you need to be a ruthless killer.

Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.

Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.

Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.

Some people may contend that there is no image more charming that a child holding a puppy or kitten. But for me that's a distant second. When I see a child clutching a book... to his or her tiny bosom, I'm moved. Children can possess a book in a way they can never possess a video game, a TV show, or a Darth Vader doll. A book comes alive when they read it. They give it life themselves by understanding it.

The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.