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Children want to do what grownups do.

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.
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Book Boys Friendship
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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Father Mother People
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
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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School Thinking Two
I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
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Children Real Teacher
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
I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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Before Grew Law Strict
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 didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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Children Giving Writing
I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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Children Only Child Sister
She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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Mean Real Talent
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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Childhood Known
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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School Ships Years
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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Children Reading Teacher
Children want to do what grownups do.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Children Want Grownups
Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
BEVERLY CLEARY

Care Girl People

Children want to do what grownups do.

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Children want to do what grownups do.

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