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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.

Beverly Cleary

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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Burton Father Imagination Mother Real Step
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
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
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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Childhood Known
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
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 am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
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Big Bigs Pests Sister
The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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Keys Successful Writing
I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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Before Grew Law Strict
My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
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Book Father Mother
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.
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Book Library Seventh
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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Children Classroom Grade Lonely School
As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
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Book Child Children
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 had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
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Book Mother Wise
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY

Book Reading Teacher

I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.

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I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.

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Popular Authors

More Beverly Cleary Quotes