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 CLEARYRamona 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.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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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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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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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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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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I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
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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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Children want to do what grownups do.
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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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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 didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.
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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 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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