Beverly Cleary Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 read my books aloud before they were published.

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

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.

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

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 just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

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.

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

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

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

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.

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

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

Children want to do what grownups do.