Problem solving, and I don’t mean algebra, seems to be my life’s work. Maybe it’s everyone’s life’s work.
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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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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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.
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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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I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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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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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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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 wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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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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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People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
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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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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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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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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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