I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
BEVERLY CLEARYChildren should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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I read my books aloud before they were published.
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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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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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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Children want to do what grownups do.
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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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She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
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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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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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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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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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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write 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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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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People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
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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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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 just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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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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