Beverly Cleary quotes:

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

I particularly enjoy cello music because our daughter plays the cello. I have listened to her practice for so many hours that I am familiar with the music written for that instrument. I am also fond of the popular music of the 1930s because my future husband and I danced to it so many Saturday nights when we were in college.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think children themselves have changed that much. It's the world that has changed.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.

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.

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.

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 longed for funny stories about the sort of children who lived in my neighborhood.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

People are inclined to say that I am Ramona. I'm not sure that's true, but I did share some experiences with her.

I think adults sometimes don't think about how children are feeling about the adult problems.

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.

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 enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

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 read my books aloud before they were published.

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.

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

Children want to do what grownups do.

I rarely read children's books.

I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.

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