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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

Beverly Cleary

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Giving Years
I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
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Book Mother Wise
My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
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Book Father Mother
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!
BEVERLY CLEARY

School Ships Years
With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.
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Book Chance Reading
When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.
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Patience Reading Teacher
Children want to do what grownups do.
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Children Want Grownups
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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Different Rummage Sales Shoes
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 Classroom Grade Lonely School
The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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Keys Successful Writing
She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.
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Girl Interesting Waiting
I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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Children Only Child Sister
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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Cousin Memories Mother
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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Children Happy Hope Readers
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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Book Imagination Stories
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

School Thinking Two

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

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