Roald Dahl

On Writing

"When you're writing, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process."

On Momentum

"I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway...taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, "When you are going good, stop writing." And that means if everything is going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter's going to go and you know just waht the people are going to do, you don't go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, they you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don't want to come back because you don't know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good...then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down...and you walk away. And you can't wait to get back because you know what you want to say next...If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble."

On Characters

"I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes and impact."