I didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
BEVERLY CLEARYI read my books aloud before they were published.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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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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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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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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I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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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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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 wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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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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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 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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Children want to do what grownups do.
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All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
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