Beverly Cleary Quotes

Shows like 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends,' they have, like, one or two damn characters throughout the whole series that are minorities.

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.

Kids can sniff out when they are being preached to, and they don't like it. So while my books aren't amoral, they are not infused with morals or a message, either, and kids like that.

I love making books for children. Big kids, little kids, old kids and new.

I never wrote my books especially for children.

Where I come from, out in the suburbs, I didn't know anyone who was a professional actor. And girls that looked like me? No girls like that were on TV.

Growing up, there were no families on TV that looked like mine.

There aren't many children's books about black characters that are just going on adventures. My library has over 2,000 children's books in it, and most of the protagonists are either white or creatures.

When my daughter was born, I was reading a lot of children's books, and there weren't any characters who looked like her. For all the content that's out there, there aren't many African-American protagonists. I looked at it like, if there isn't someone else creating it then I have to do it myself.

A lot of school-going children are familiar with my writing. I am basically very much a children books author.

Writing children's books all started out as a way for me to give back and make a difference.

There's a difference between children's literature and all-ages literature. One is written expressly for children. The other is written for everyone, including children. And the difference usually manifests in not talking down to kids.

I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.

I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.

Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.

He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.

What should a good children’s book be like? If you ask me, I can tell you after thinking long and hard: It must be good.

I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it.

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

There's a part of me with every book that thinks, What would it have meant for me tohave had this book when I was a kid? I decided to create a book for girls like me. The Littlest Bigfoot is about bullying and body image and girls who don't fit in. It's like training wheels for my adult books - like Sex and the City, but with 12-year-olds.

When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.

When I was growing up, I didn't see me in the movies except in certain lesser roles. If it wasn't funny, I wasn't there. Then Sidney Poitier came along, and he wasn't funny. He was just good. There's me. So that was my pattern.

I am convinced that not only do children need children's books to fine-tune their brains, but our civilization needs them if we are not going to unplug ourselves from our collective past.

I still retain a bit of a child's focus on things, so we [with my sister] figure if we're going to write books, our best shot is to write children's books, because we relate pretty readily on that level.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.