Top 120 Beverly Cleary Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.”

— Beverly Cleary

2. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Children

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

— Beverly Cleary

4. “Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.”

— Beverly Cleary

Featured in: Reading Quotes

5. “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

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

— Beverly Cleary

7. “My, Juanita, you’re getting to be a big girl. How old are you? I can’t keep track.”

— Beverly Cleary

8. “De Sooner De Better De Later De Letter De Madder I Getter.”

— Beverly Cleary

9. “She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.”

— Beverly Cleary

10. “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.”

— Beverly Cleary

11. “If she can’t spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.”

— Beverly Cleary

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

— Beverly Cleary

13. “All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.”

— Beverly Cleary

14. “I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.”

— Beverly Cleary

15. “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.”

— Beverly Cleary

16. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

17. “Quite often somebody will say, ‘What year do your books take place?’ and the only answer I can give is, in childhood.”

— Beverly Cleary

18. “Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises.”

— Beverly Cleary

19. “She expected the class to laugh, but instead they listened in silent sympathy.”

— Beverly Cleary

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

— Beverly Cleary

21. “She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.”

— Beverly Cleary

22. “I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.”

— Beverly Cleary

23. “Don’t eat so noisily. My grandmother used to say, ‘A smack at the table is worth a smack on the bottom.”

— Beverly Cleary

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

— Beverly Cleary

25. “Ribsy jumped up on Henry and looked so eager that Henry couldn’t help petting him. “What am I going to do with you, anyway?” he asked.”

— Beverly Cleary

26. “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 days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.”

— Beverly Cleary

27. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

28. “Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.”

— Beverly Cleary

29. “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.”

— Beverly Cleary

Featured in: Reading Quotes

30. “The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.”

— Beverly Cleary

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

— Beverly Cleary

32. “I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.”

— Beverly Cleary

33. “I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.”

— Beverly Cleary

34. “This morning the sun was shining, so Barry and I mailed my letter to Mr. Henshaw and then walked over to see if there were still any butterflies in the grove. We only saw three or four, so I guess most of them have gone north for the summer. Then we walked down to the little park at Lovers Point and sat on a rock watching sailboats on the bay for a while. When clouds began to blow in we walked back to my house.”

— Beverly Cleary

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

— Beverly Cleary

36. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

37. “I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.”

— Beverly Cleary

38. “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. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.”

— Beverly Cleary

Featured in: Reading Quotes

39. “Today I discovered two kinds of people who go to high school: those who wear new clothes to show off on the first day, and those who wear their oldest clothes to show they think school is unimportant.”

— Beverly Cleary

40. “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

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

— Beverly Cleary

42. “I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.”

— Beverly Cleary

43. “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

44. “He was dressed as if everything he wore had come from different stores or from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined.”

— Beverly Cleary

45. “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

46. “The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else – grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.”

— Beverly Cleary

47. “As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.”

— Beverly Cleary

48. “People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.”

— Beverly Cleary

49. “What interests me is what children go through while growing up.”

— Beverly Cleary

50. “I read my books aloud before they were published.”

— Beverly Cleary