Beverly Cleary
Beverly Cleary
Beverly Atlee Clearyis an American writer of children's and young adult fiction. One of America's most successful living authors, 91 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide since her first book was published in 1950. Some of her best known characters are Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, Ramona and Beezus Quimby, and Ralph S. Mouse...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth12 April 1916
CityMcminnville, OR
CountryUnited States of America
She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.
What interests me is what children go through while growing up.
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!
As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be 'better' children.
Didn't the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?
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.
The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
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.
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.
I grew up before there were strict leash laws.
Neither the mouse nor the boy was the least bit surprised that each could understand the other. Two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language.
I didn't start out writing to give children hope, but I'm glad some of them found it.
Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.