“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.”

When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is sparky.

The snozberries taste like snozberries!

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

A little magic can take you a long way.

When I first thought about writing the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I never originally meant to have children in it at all!

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

We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.

Sex is like nose picking. It’s fine as long as you practice it yourself, but it’s disgusting watching someone else doing it.

If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

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.

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.

There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t started wondering about yet.

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

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

You should never, never doubt something that no one is sure of.

Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.

It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind that determines which way we will go.

Change your thinking and change your life.

Achievable goals are the first step to self improvement.

If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.

As you think, so shall you become.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.