Beverly Cleary Quotes

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.

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!

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.

I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

Problem solving, and I don't mean algebra, seems to be my life's work. Maybe it's everyone's life's work.

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.

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.

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.

Children want to do what grownups do.

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.

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

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.

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.

I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.

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.

My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.

She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.

If she can't spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.

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

Don't stop now. Go ahead! Be readers all of your lives. And don't forget, librarians and teachers can help you find the right books to read.

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

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

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

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.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.

All her life she had wanted to squeeze the toothpaste really squeeze it,not just one little squirt. [...] The paste coiled and swirled and mounded in the washbasin. Ramona decorated the mound with toothpaste roses as if it was a toothpaste birthday cake

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.

My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.

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.

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

I was an only child; I didn't have a sister, or sisters.

I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.

Didn't the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?

He was dressed as if everything he wore had come from different stores or from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined.

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.

I read my books aloud before they were published.

I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.

I am not a pest," Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.

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.

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.

Neither the mouse nor the boy was the least bit surprised that each could understand the other. Two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language.

I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.

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.