The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
BEVERLY CLEARYShe means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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Children want to do what grownups do.
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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
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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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I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
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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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I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
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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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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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If we finished our work, the teacher would say, ‘Now don’t read ahead.’ But sometimes I hid the book I was reading behind my geography book and did read ahead. You can hide a lot behind a geography book.
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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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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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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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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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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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In seventh grade…I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.
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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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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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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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 was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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