Beverly Cleary Quotes

I hope children will be happy with the books I've written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

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

Children want to do what grownups do.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

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

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.

I read my books aloud before they were published.

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

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.

All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.

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 guess that’s what growing up is. Saying good-by to a lot of things. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it isn’t. But it is all right.

Tiddlywinks, tiddlywinks, I want to play tiddlywinks, " chanted Ramona, shaking her head back and forth.