There's nothin' you can get from a book that you can't get from a television fastah!" -Harry Wormwood

What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself. Nobody has ever had such a lovely time as this!

Do you like vegetables?" Sophie asked, hoping to steer the conversation towards a slightly less dangerous kind of food. "You is trying to change the subject," the Giant said sternly. "We is having an interesting babblement about the taste of the human bean. The human bean is not a vegetable.

But there was one other thing that the grown-ups also knew, and it was this: that however small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

If my books can help children become readers then I feel I have accomplished something important.

There is no place I know that compares to pure imagination.

I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile, because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it, so watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you with his mouth but the eyes stay the same. It's sure to be bogus.