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

Beverly Cleary

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Beverly Cleary
Age: 104 †
Born: 1916
Born: April 12
Died: 2021
Died: March 25
Author
Autobiographer
Librarian
Writer
McMinnville
Oregon
Beverly Atlee Cleary
Writing
Shelves
Write
Book

More quotes by Beverly Cleary

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I hope children will be happy with the books I've written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.
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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
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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.
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My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
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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.
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I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.
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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
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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.
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I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
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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.
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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.
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Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
Beverly Cleary
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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
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What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
Beverly Cleary
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Children want to do what grownups do.
Beverly Cleary
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be 'better' children.
Beverly Cleary
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The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
Beverly Cleary
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I am not a pest, Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
Beverly Cleary
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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
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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