Quotes from Beverly Cleary

Yard Apes! yelled Ramona, her name for the sort of boys who always got the best balls, who were always first on the playground, and who chased their soccer balls through other people's hopscotch games.

Grown-ups often forgot that no child likes to be ordered to be nice to another child.

She wanted to do something bad. She wanted to do something terrible that would shock her whole family, something that would make them sit up and take notice.

reprimand. In her class she once informed us that any girl who wore red was "asking for anything she got." Of course word spread throughout Chaffey. The next day every girl who owned a red dress, skirt, or blouse wore it to school. One

Beezus has told her the way to remember how to spell the kind of principal who was the principal of a school was to remember the word ended in p-a-l, and not -p-l-e, was because the principal was her pal.

Figuring out the long word before her name took a while, and

It isn't fair, Ramona told herself, even though grown-ups were always telling her life was not fair. It wasn't fair that life was not fair.

I grew up before there were strict leash laws

That Ramona! thought Henry. Always causing him trouble on his route.

A girl shouldn't hold a baked stuffed onion against a boy forever.

Having a sister who tried to act like the Virgin Mary was not easy for a girl who felt as Ramona did.

Quimbys' house where

Oh, children and pets!" said the lady, with an airy laugh. "You never can tell what little children are going to say, and I have had a lot of pets and they are always into something.

Matt was the only adult who understood Ralph. "Yes, sir, that mouse is a mouse in a million," he often told himself.

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

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.

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

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

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'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.

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!

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

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.