Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
BEVERLY CLEARYI 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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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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 was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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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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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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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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Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
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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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She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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I read my books aloud before they were published.
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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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