Roald Dahl

If you are good, life is good.

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

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.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

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

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.

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

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

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 are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

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.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

As a child I used to read Gone with the Wind over and over again. I wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara. I never wanted to believe that it was possible that there could be infidelity. I never wanted to be believe that it was even possible for a man to look another way, even for a moment. My bubble of monogamy was pierced in a harsh way.

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

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

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

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

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

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.

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