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.
BEVERLY CLEARYI 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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We didn’t have television in those days, and many people didn’t even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening.
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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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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
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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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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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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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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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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 was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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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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She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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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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