Roald Dahl

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

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

If you are good, life is good.

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.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.

Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.

No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself.

Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

Where charity keeps pace with grain, industry is blessed, but to slave to get, and keep it sordidly, is a sin against Providence, a vice in government and an injury to their neighbours.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

Such as take lodgings in a head that’s to be let unfurnished.

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.