If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
BEVERLY CLEARYPeople are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
-
-
I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Ramona stepped back into her closet, slid the door shut, pressed an imaginary button, and when her imaginary elevator had made its imaginary descent, stepped out onto the real first floor and raced a real problem. Her mother and father were leaving for Parents’ Night.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Children want to do what grownups do.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Problem solving, and I don’t mean algebra, seems to be my life’s work. Maybe it’s everyone’s life’s work.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY