Top 93 Beverly Cleary Quotes
#1. I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
Beverly Cleary
#2. Words were so puzzling. Present should mean a present just as attack should mean to stick tacks in people.
Beverly Cleary
#4. If we finished our work, the teacher would say, 'Now don't read ahead.' But sometimes I hid the book I was reading behind my geography book and did read ahead. You can hide a lot behind a geography book.
Beverly Cleary
#5. People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don't really read children's books.
Beverly Cleary
#6. I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
Beverly Cleary
#7. The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
Beverly Cleary
#8. My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon - this was before television, and we didn't even have a radio - I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read.
Beverly Cleary
#9. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#10. Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.
Beverly Cleary
#11. Ramona grabbed the book. "It's mine. I told you it was mine!" Then she turned to Beezus and said triumphantly, "You said people didn't buy books at the library and now you just bought one!
Beverly Cleary
#12. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#13. 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
Beverly Cleary
#14. Over the years, I have been approached about making Ramona into a cartoon or movie, but I was afraid that no one could really capture the spunky character of Ramona.
Beverly Cleary
#15. She would not have hurt the old man's feelings for anything in the world.
Beverly Cleary
#16. He would be atleast sixteen-old enough to have a driver's licence- and he would have crinkles around his eyes that showed he had a sense of humor and he would be tall, the kind of boy all the other girls would like to date
Beverly Cleary
#17. I like to read, walk, cook, and travel to cities. We live in the country, so we miss museums and the bustle of city life.
Beverly Cleary
#18. I don't think children themselves have changed that much. It's the world that has changed.
Beverly Cleary
#19. Say, who is this Mr. King?" "What Mr. King?" asked Ramona, walking into his trap. "Nosmo King,
Beverly Cleary
#20. I know this is probably sort of sudden." The boy hesitated. "But I was wodnering if you would care to go to the movies with me tomorrow night.
Beverly Cleary
#22. They wiped his paws on a good bath towel whenever he came in with wet feet, because they had not been married long enough to have an old bath towel,
Beverly Cleary
#23. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#24. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#25. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#26. I hope children will be happy with the books I've written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.
Beverly Cleary
#27. That was the trouble with this house. A girl couldn't even carry on a telephone conversation with any privacy
Beverly Cleary
#28. And the muscles of his scrawny arms Are strong as rubber bands.
Beverly Cleary
#29. I'm just lucky. I do have very clear memories of childhood. I find that many people don't, but I'm just very fortunate that I have that kind of memory.
Beverly Cleary
#30. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#31. Uncle Avery, who was not only postmaster but mayor of Pitchfork as well.
Beverly Cleary
#32. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#33. Amy thought a moment. How could they get rid of their mother? We could have her away taking care of a sick neighbor, and we are all alone in the house
Beverly Cleary
#35. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#36. If she can't spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
Beverly Cleary
#38. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#39. I wrote books to entertain. I'm not trying to teach anything! If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book.
Beverly Cleary
#40. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#41. I am sort of medium ... I guess you could call me the mediumest boy in the class. -Leigh Botts
Beverly Cleary
#42. Tiddlywinks, tiddlywinks, I want to play tiddlywinks, chanted Ramona, shaking her head back and forth.
Beverly Cleary
#43. Ralph really felt sorry for the boy, hampered as he was by his youth and his mother.
Beverly Cleary
#44. I didn't start out writing to give children hope, but I'm glad some of them found it.
Beverly Cleary
#45. If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.
Beverly Cleary
#47. Poor Miss Binney, dressed like Mother Goose, now had the responsibility of sixty-eight boys and girls.
Beverly Cleary
#48. I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.
Beverly Cleary
#49. And now I'm going to find out how to get a library started.
Beverly Cleary
#51. Ellen might have known her best friend would think of something like that.
Beverly Cleary
#52. Ramona was originally an accidental character I added to the Henry Huggins books because I noticed that none of the characters had siblings. I added Ramona as Beazus' pestering little sister.
Beverly Cleary
#53. I am not a pest, Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
Beverly Cleary
#54. People are inclined to say that I am Ramona. I'm not sure that's true, but I did share some experiences with her.
Beverly Cleary
#55. Dear Emily, This week I went to the library. I got Black Beauty. It is about a horse. It is the best book I ever read. I read it three times. I have to go now. Write soon. Yours truly, Muriel. P.S. Mama sends her love.
Beverly Cleary
#56. Oh well, thought Jane, that's how men are. He's probably taking it for granted. She found it very pleasant to be taken for granted by Stan
Beverly Cleary
#57. Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
Beverly Cleary
#58. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#59. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#60. What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
Beverly Cleary
#61. As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be 'better' children.
Beverly Cleary
#62. I longed for funny stories about the sort of children who lived in my neighborhood.
Beverly Cleary
#63. Problem solving, and I don't mean algebra, seems to be my life's work. Maybe it's everyone's life's work.
Beverly Cleary
#64. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
Beverly Cleary
#65. Willa Jean, pleased to have her grandmother on her side, set a red checker on top of a black checker. "Your turn," she said to Ramona as if she were being generous.
Beverly Cleary
#66. I haven't been very enthusiastic about the commercialization of children's literature. Kids should borrow books from the library and not necessarily be buying them.
Beverly Cleary
#67. most beautiful, magic time of the whole year. Her parents loved her, and she loved them,
Beverly Cleary
#68. I think adults sometimes don't think about how children are feeling about the adult problems.
Beverly Cleary
#69. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#70. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#71. I was an only child; I didn't have a sister, or sisters.
Beverly Cleary
#73. 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!
Beverly Cleary
#74. I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children. Some of the teachers were just doing their job, but others had that little extra. They really cared about children and they wore pretty dresses.
Beverly Cleary
#75. She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
Beverly Cleary
#76. 'Dear Mr. Henshaw' came about because two different boys from different parts of the country asked me to write a book about a boy whose parents were divorced, and so I wrote 'Dear Mr. Henshaw,' and it won the Newbery, and I was - it's been very popular.
Beverly Cleary
#77. Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
Beverly Cleary
#78. Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.
Beverly Cleary
#79. I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
Beverly Cleary
#80. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#81. Quite often somebody will say, 'What year do your books take place?' and the only answer I can give is, in childhood.
Beverly Cleary
#82. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#83. I don't ever go on the Internet. I don't even know how it works.
Beverly Cleary
#84. I know that when I was a children's librarian, that was about 1940, boys particularly asked where were the books about kids like us, and there weren't any at that time.
Beverly Cleary
#85. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#87. Well, she thought, I'm certainly bright. She had wanted to meet a new boy and when she finally did meet one she didn't even find out his name
Beverly Cleary
#88. If they had been riding in a car, she would have waited for him to go around and open the door for her, but riding in a truck is different
Beverly Cleary
#89. 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.
Beverly Cleary
#90. Didn't the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
Beverly Cleary
#91. Emily was lucky in many ways. She was lucky in the house she lived in, a house with three balconies, a cupola, banisters just right for sliding down, and the second bathtub in Yamhill County.
Beverly Cleary
#92. In 50 years, the world has changed, especially for kids, but kids' needs haven't changed. They still need to feel safe, be close to their families, like their teachers, and have friends to play with.
Beverly Cleary
#93. 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.
Beverly Cleary
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