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.
BEVERLY CLEARYI am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
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I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
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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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I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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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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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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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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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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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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Children want to do what grownups do.
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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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All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
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I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
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I didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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