Quotes By Beverly Cleary

I rarely read children's books.

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.

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

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.

I was a librarian.

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.

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

I read my books aloud before they were published.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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!

I didn't start out writing to give children hope, but I'm glad some of them found it.

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

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

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