Roald Dahl

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.

There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t started wondering about yet.

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

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 sun beams and you will always look lovely!

You don’t want to be with a boy who is too stupid to appreciate a smart young lady. There is no boy who is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education.

I was brought up in a very ordinary family, in fact, a worker’s family. Both my father and mother were ordinary citizens.

The streets and woods around my house were a perfect setting for fake mischief. I would spend all afternoon pretending I had run away and had to live on my own. I would bring Toll House cookies and a sweatshirt and try to make a fire. I would sneak out side my house at dusk with a pair binoculars and search the streets for murderers. I created scenarios in my head that I always managed to escape from kidnap fantasies where I would wriggle free from the ropes.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

Everything depends on upbringing.

If you’re bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don’t think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really.

You can’t cheat kids. If you cheat them when they’re children they’ll make you pay when they’re sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that’s finally when they’re old enough to stand up to you and say, ‘What a hypocrite you’ve been all this time. You’ve never given me what I really wanted, which is you’.

I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.

I was planning to go into law or politics. I was well known for my public speaking. I went to an all-girl boarding school with uniforms. It was very posh for someone like me who came from a world where my parents showed beagles and sold dog products out of a yellow caravan.

We can aim to create a culture, where kids ask for healthy options instead of resisting them.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

We’re all mad here.

Children had rather be making of Tools and Instruments of Play; Shaping, Drawing, Framing, and Building, &c. than getting some Rules of Propriety of Speech by Heart: And those also would follow with more Judgment, and less Trouble and Time.