Fun Facts about

Roald

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Favorite Color: Yellow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roald's Likes, Dislikes, and Hobbies

 

While Roald Dahl spent a lot of his time writing, he also enjoyed a variety of hobbies. He loved food and wine, gardening (he grew gigantic onions), listening to classical music, and both playing and watching sports, especially snooker, horse racing, rugby, and soccer.

He did not like people with colds, people that weren't honest, Christmas (he preferred Easter), or sitting still in cinemas or theaters since there was never enough room for his long legs.

 

How Roald Dahl Wrote

Roald wrote most of his stories in a small hut at the bottom of his garden in his Gipsy Home in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, England. The hut was certainly small and dingy. Christopher Simon Sykes describes it best in Harpers and Queen: "A dirty plastic curtain covered the window. In the centre stood a faded wing-back armchair, inherited from his mother, and it was here that Dahl sat, his feet propped up on a chest, his legs covered by a tartan rug, supporting on his knees a thick roll of corrugated paper upon which was propped his writing board. Photographs, drawings, and other mementoes were pinned to the walls, while a table on his right was covered with a collection of favourite curiosities such as one of his own arthritic hip bones and a remarkably heavy ball made from the discarded silver paper of numerous chocolate bars consumed during his youth.

 

Where His Ideas Came From

 

Most of Roald's inspiration for writing his stories came from his experiences as a child and from his own children. His homesickness and distrust of authority while away at school as a young boy account for the common themes and settings between his stories. And as a father, Dahl created many bedtime stories for his children, which motivated him to write his first true children's book, James and the Giant Peach (1961). (Dahl had already written Gremlins (1943), but did not himself believe it was a children's book).

Some of Dahl's books also have unique stories behind them individually. For instance, when creating the giant for The BFG, Dahl described the BFG as wearing huge wellington boots. Illustrator Quentin Blake thought that the boots looked boring and asked if they could be changed. In response, Dahl sent Blake a package containing one of his gigantic, Norwegian sandals. If you look at the book, the BFG is wearing Roald's sandals!

Also, the idea behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) came from his days as a chocolate taste tester for the great chocolate manufacturer Cadbury. Cadbury would send each boy in Dahl's House at Repton a plain, gray cardboard box filled with chocolate. Accompanying the boxes was a sheet of paper with two blank columns. In one column, the boys gave the chocolate a mark from 1 to 10, and in the other, they wrote comments. The boys believed themselves to be great chocolate connoisseurs and enjoyed their job immensely. From this experience, Dahl began to realize that large chocolate companies really did contain inventing rooms full of bubbling pots and fantastic, tasty inventions. Dahl would have dreams about inventing the world's greatest chocolate, taking it to Mr. Cadbury and having him exclaim, " 'You've got it! You've done it! It's a miracle!...We'll sell it by the million! We'll sweep the world with this one! How on earth did you do it? Your salary is
doubled!'" (Dahl, Boy 135). Commenting on his dream, Dahl says, "...I have no doubt at all that, thirty-five years later, when I was looking for a plot for my second book for children, I remembered those little cardboard boxes and the newly-invented chocolates inside them, and I began to write a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (Dahl, Boy 135).

 

What Others Say About Dahl

 

“I ended up spending four hours with the author… indelibly etched on my memory. He wore a dark blue shirt with blue shorts from which his impossibly long legs protruded like twin sticks; his long, lean, marvellously expressive face was creased with years of laughter lines, his mouth never far from a smile that reached his eyes every time. Dahl was amusing, interesting, stimulating company and a charming, punctilious, entertaining host.”
Maria Lexton - Time Out

 

“Every evening after my sister Lucy and I had gone to bed, my father would walk slowly up the stairs, his bones creaking louder than the staircase, to tell us a story. I can see him now, leaning against the wall of our bedroom with his hands in his pockets looking into the distance, reaching into his imagination. It was here, in our bedroom, that he began telling many of the stories that later became the books you know.”
Ophelia Dahl - Dahl's Daughter

 

“He did everything with panache right down to cooking poached eggs which he served in pieces of fried bread with holes cut out of them to make a nest… There was never a moment when he wasn't inventing or making life fun.”
Liccy Dahl - Dahl's Second Wife