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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
Book
Writing
Shelves
Write

More quotes by 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 was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
Beverly Cleary
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I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
Beverly Cleary
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I am not a pest, Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.
Beverly Cleary
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Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
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.
Beverly Cleary
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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.
Beverly Cleary
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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
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Children want to do what grownups do.
Beverly Cleary
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I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
Beverly Cleary
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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.
Beverly Cleary
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I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
Beverly Cleary
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I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.
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
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As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be 'better' children.
Beverly Cleary
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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.
Beverly Cleary
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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
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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
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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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Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.
Beverly Cleary