“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!”

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.

If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.

Then, believe it or not, along came the wave of the English cats like John Mayall, Eric Clapton and the Stones embracing the great American art form – the blues.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers’ growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement – and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

Emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the “country” mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.

Anyone who doesn’t speak English isn’t worth speaking to

I love Evensong. There’s something sad and essentially English about it.

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.