Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A BOOK?! WHAT D'YOU WANNA FLAMING BOOK FOR?...WE'VE GOT A LOVELY TELLY WITH A 12-INCH SCREEN AND NOW YA WANNA BOOK!
An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.
I doubt I would have written a line ... unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.
Fiona has the same glacial beauty of an iceburg, but unlike the iceburg she has absolutely nothing below the surface.
You ignorant little slug!" the Trunchbull bellowed. "You witless weed! You empty-headed hamster! You stupid glob of glue!
I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.
Had I not had children of my own, I would have never written books for children, nor would I have been capable of doing so.
Sex is like nose picking. It's fine as long as you practice it yourself, but it's disgusting watching someone else doing it.
It was slowly beginning to dawn upon Henry that nothing is any fun if you can get as much of it as you want. Especially money.
Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!
Well, first of all," said the BFG, "human beans is not really believing in giants, is they? Human beans is not thinking we exist.
All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can't swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe.
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it.
...there are no secrets unless you keep them to yourself, and this was the greatest secret I had ever had to keep in my life so far.
I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.
Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset.
I go down to my little hut, where it's tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.
When I first thought about writing the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I never originally meant to have children in it at all!
Titchy little snapperwhippers like you should not be higgling around with an old sage and onions who is hundreds of years more than you.
Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.
The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
Prayers were held in Assembly Hall. We all perched in rows on wooden benches while teachers sat up on the platform in armchairs, facing us.
I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers.
You seemed so far away," Miss Honey whispered, awestruck. "Oh, I was. I was flying past the stars on silver wings," Matilda said. "It was wonderful.
Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.
I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt.
The Bristol Channel was always my guide, and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. It was a great comfort.
Pear Drops were exciting because they had a dangerous taste. All of us were warned against eating them, and the result was that we ate them more than ever.
My dear young fellow,' the Old-Green-Grasshopper said gently, 'there are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet.
I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.
The walls were wet and sticky, and peach juice was dripping from the ceiling. James opened his mouth and caught some of it on his tongue. It tasted delicious.
If I were a headmaster, I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead and my pupils would study a subject that affected all of them.
All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely.
I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I'll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.
Wonka: But, Charlie, don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted. Charlie: What happened? Wonka: He lived happily ever after.
The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.
... and when he put his mind to it, he could make his words coil themselves around and around the listener until they held her in some sort of a mild hypnotic spell.
Poor Earthworm,' the Ladybird said, whispering in James's ear. 'He loves to make everything into a disaster. He hates to be happy. He is only happy when he is gloomy.
I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.
Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don't know how awful it is unti you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die.
Whipped cream isn't whipped cream at all if it hasnt been whipped with whips, just like poached eggs isn't poached eggs unless it's been stolen in the dead of the night.
Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!
Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.
All you do is to look / At a page in this book / Because that's where we always will be. / No book ever ends / When it's full of your friends / The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.
When I walked to school in the mornings I would start out alone but would pick up four other boys along the way. We would set out together after school across the village green.
Matilda said, "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.
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
The matter with human beans," the BFG went on, "is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles.