I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.
BEVERLY CLEARYHe 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
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Problem solving, and I don’t mean algebra, seems to be my life’s work. Maybe it’s everyone’s life’s work.
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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write 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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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.
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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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Children want to do what grownups do.
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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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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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.
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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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I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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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.
BEVERLY CLEARY







