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...”

“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...”

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

“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 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 a...”

“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.”

“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. Ev...”

“Children want to do what grownups do.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I grew up before there were strict leash laws.”

“I was a librarian.”

“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 write in longhand on yellow legal pads.”

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

“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.”

“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 an...”

“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.”