Roald Dahl

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.

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 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.

It's going to be a rule, I think, for wearing a crash hat, and I actually fractured my skull through not wearing a hat. I was so lucky to escape from that, and now, it's something I always do.

It's terribly important that you can criticise people's ideas without criticising them, and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth.

The weird thing about grief, for me at least, was when each of my parents died, for a year or two afterwards I was pretty wildly brave - just willing to take life on.