Betsy Byars Quotes

#1. When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'll have a book.

Betsy Byars

#2. That was the trouble with life - it never quite fulfilled its promises.

Betsy Byars

#3. It was as if her life was a huge kaleidoscope, and the kaleidoscope had been turned and now everything was changed. The same stones shaken, no longer made the same design.

Betsy Byars

#4. Writing is like anything - baseball playing, piano playing, sewing, hammering nails. The more you work on it, the better you get. But it seems to take a longer time to get better at writing than hammering nails.

Betsy Byars

#5. Early in my career, I decided not to do sequels. I know that children enjoy them, but I valued the feeling that this was the only time I would write about these characters. I felt it gave me an added incentive to do my best by them, to tell readers everything I knew, to hold nothing back.

Betsy Byars

#6. My own hobbies are rather quiet. I like to read and do needlework, and I love animals.

Betsy Byars

#7. I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'l have a book. It is such a pleasurable moment that I type many more title pages than I could ever use.

Betsy Byars

#8. For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

Betsy Byars

#9. The real reason I had wanted to grow up, the main reason I had been willing to even consider becoming an adult, was so I could have as many pets as I wanted.

Betsy Byars

#10. I think how you look is the most important thing in the world. If you look cute, you are cute; if you look smart, you are smart, and if you don't look like anything, you aren't anything.

Betsy Byars

#11. The people you don't know turn out to be exactly like the people you do know, same faults, same everything.

Betsy Byars

#12. I love writing. I've pursued it with a passion.

Betsy Byars

#13. I have cried over myself a hundred times this summer, she thought, I have wept over my big feet and my skinny legs and my nose, I have even cried over my stupid shoes, and now when I have true sadness there are no tears left.

Betsy Byars