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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

Beverly Cleary

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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Library Seventh
He 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.
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Different Rummage Sales Shoes
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
I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
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Fairy Tales Great Library
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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Girl Interesting Waiting
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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Book Imagination Stories
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
Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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Bedtime Needs Writers
If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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Book Want Writing
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
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Children Reading Teacher
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
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
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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Boys Grief Humilation Perhaps Regret Turned
I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
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Book Children Grow Up

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

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