Beverly Cleary Quotes

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Beverly Cleary

Profession : Author

Birth : April 12, 1916

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.

Beverly Cleary

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

Children want to do what grownups do.

Beverly Cleary

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

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

Beverly Cleary

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.

Beverly Cleary

I read my books aloud before they were published.

Beverly Cleary

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

Beverly Cleary

I was a librarian.

Beverly Cleary

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

Beverly Cleary

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

Beverly Cleary

I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

Beverly Cleary

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

Beverly Cleary

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

Beverly Cleary

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

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

Beverly Cleary

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

Beverly Cleary

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!

Beverly Cleary

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.

Beverly Cleary

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.

Beverly Cleary