Quotes By Beverly Cleary

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

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

People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don't really read children's books.

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

Children want to do what grownups do.

I don't think children's inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play.

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

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

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.

I rarely read children's books.

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.

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.

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

I was a librarian.

I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

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.

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

People are inclined to say that I am Ramona. I'm not sure that's true, but I did share some experiences with her.

I read my books aloud before they were published.

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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!