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 CLEARYIf she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
More Beverly Cleary Quotes
-
-
I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
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 -
Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
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 -
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
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 -
I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Children want to do what grownups do.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I read my books aloud before they were published.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Problem solving, and I don’t mean algebra, seems to be my life’s work. Maybe it’s everyone’s life’s work.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
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 -
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!
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
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.
BEVERLY CLEARY -
She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
BEVERLY CLEARY