Beverly Cleary Quotes

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.

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.

I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.

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.

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.

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.

I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.

As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.