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I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

Beverly Cleary

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Children Reading Teacher
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
I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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Big Bigs Pests Sister
If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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Book Want Writing
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
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Reading Teacher
Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
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Book Giving Years
Children want to do what grownups do.
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Children Want Grownups
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 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
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
I read my books aloud before they were published.
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Books Publisher Read
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
I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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Before Grew Law Strict
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
I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Children Happy Hope Readers

I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

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I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

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