Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
BEVERLY CLEARYI 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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Didn’t the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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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 great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
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People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.
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I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
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All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
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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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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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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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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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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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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I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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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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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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She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
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I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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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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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.
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When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.
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If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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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 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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