I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
BEVERLY CLEARYQuite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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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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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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 don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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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My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
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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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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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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 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 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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Children want to do what grownups do.
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