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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.

Beverly Cleary

Related Topics

BookChildChildren

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More Beverly Cleary Quotes

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  She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.

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• 

  Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

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  Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.

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  I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.

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  What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

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  I don’t necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that’s most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

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  I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.

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  I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.

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  He was dressed as if everything he wore had come from different stores or from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined.

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  She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.

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  If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.

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• 

  My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.

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  I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.

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  The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.

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• 

  I feel sometimes that in children’s books there are more and more grim problems, but I don’t know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them.

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  I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

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