As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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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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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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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 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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Children want to do what grownups do.
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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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 read my books aloud before they were published.
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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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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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.
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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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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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