black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.

Beverly Cleary

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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Children Want
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Imagination Stories
I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Children Real Teacher
I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Children Happy Hope Readers
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Boys Friendship
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Chance Reading
I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Before Grew Law Strict
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 CLEARY

Burton Father Imagination Mother Real Step
Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
BEVERLY CLEARY

Care Girl People
I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Children Only Child Sister
Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Giving Years
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 CLEARY

Children Classroom Grade Lonely School
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Different Rummage Sales Shoes
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Children Inspiring Mother
Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Bedtime Needs Writers
In seventh grade…I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Library Seventh
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

School Thinking Two
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 CLEARY

School Ships Years
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Girl Interesting Waiting
If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Know Librarians Should
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Cousin Memories Mother
I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Ballerina Changed Mind
I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Fairy Tales Great Library
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Father Mother People
People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Books Children People
My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Father Mother
If 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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Reading Teacher

I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Beverly Cleary Quotes