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!
BEVERLY CLEARYIf 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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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 had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
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I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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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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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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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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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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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 an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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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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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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Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
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