Beverly Cleary Quotes - Page 2

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.

I don't ever go on the Internet. I don't even know how it works.

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

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.

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

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

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.

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.

I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.

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.

All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.