Roald Dahl

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he wanted. He lived happily ever after.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it. – Vronksy (Anna Karenina)

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Why not blame the libraries? They’re full of violent books.

If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

The last book I read was the book I’ve been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.