I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
BEVERLY CLEARYThe key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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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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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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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 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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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.
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I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play.
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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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Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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Children want to do what grownups do.
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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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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.
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I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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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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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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