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.
BEVERLY CLEARYThe key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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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 was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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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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I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom – there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.
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People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
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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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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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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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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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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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I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.
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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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