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.
BEVERLY CLEARYI was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
-
-
As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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 CLEARY -
Today I discovered two kinds of people who go to high school: those who wear new clothes to show off on the first day, and those who wear their oldest clothes to show they think school is unimportant.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises.
BEVERLY CLEARY