Hooray!" said the Chief of the Army. "Let's blow everyone up! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!

The prime function of the children's book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it. And that first love affair between the young child and the young book will lead hopefully to other loves for other books and when that happens the battle is probably won. The child will have found a crock of gold. He will also have gained something that will help to carry him most marvelously through the tangles of his later years. Roald Dahl

The more risks you allow your children to make, the better they learn to look after themselves.

Words," he said, "is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.

When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things [...] The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process.

Writing is mainly perspiration, not inspiration.

We make realities out of our dreams and dreams out of our realities. We are the dreamers of the dream.