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.
BEVERLY CLEARYI was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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 read my books aloud before they were published.
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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 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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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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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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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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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 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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Children want to do what grownups do.
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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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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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People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
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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 didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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