With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.
BEVERLY CLEARYIn seventh grade…I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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Today I discovered two kinds of people who go to high school: those who wear new clothes to show off on the first day, and those who wear their oldest clothes to show they think school is unimportant.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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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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Don’t stop now. Go ahead! Be readers all of your lives. And don’t forget, librarians and teachers can help you find the right books to read.
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I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
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Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
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The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else–grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.
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In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!
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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 don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play.
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I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
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I didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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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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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 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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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
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I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
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Problem solving, and I don’t mean algebra, seems to be my life’s work. Maybe it’s everyone’s life’s work.
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I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother’s cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.
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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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When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.
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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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Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises.
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Ramona stepped back into her closet, slid the door shut, pressed an imaginary button, and when her imaginary elevator had made its imaginary descent, stepped out onto the real first floor and raced a real problem. Her mother and father were leaving for Parents’ Night.
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