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.
BEVERLY CLEARYWith twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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I 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.
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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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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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 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 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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I read my books aloud before they were published.
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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.
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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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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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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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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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Children want to do what grownups do.
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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 just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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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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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 an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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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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