My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
BEVERLY CLEARYI was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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I read my books aloud before they were published.
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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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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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 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 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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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 ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
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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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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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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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Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
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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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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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Children want to do what grownups do.
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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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She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.
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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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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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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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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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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 you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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