I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
BEVERLY CLEARYThe humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else–grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else–grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.
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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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I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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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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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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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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.
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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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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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People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
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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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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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I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
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I read my books aloud before they were published.
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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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