Roald Dahl sisters. Dahl always maintained that his mother and her stories had a strong influence on his writing. In one interview, he mentioned: "She was a great teller of tales. Her memory was prodigious and nothing that ever happened to her in her life was forgotten." When Dahl started writing and publishing his famous books for children, he created a grandmother character in "The Witches" and later stated that she was based directly on his own mother as a tribute. In 1961, Dahl hosted and wrote for a science fiction and horror television anthology series called "Way Out", which preceded the
Roald Dahl Cried", a picture book about the siege of West Beirut by the Israeli army during the 1982 Lebanon War. He wrote that the book would make readers "violently anti-Israeli", stating: "I am not anti-Semitic. I am anti-Israel." Dahl told a reporter in 1983: "There's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity ... I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason." In 1990, during an interview with "The Independent," Dahl explained that his issue with Israel began when they invaded Lebanon