Beverly Cleary Quotes

The puppet characters were combinations of people I had known and to some degree aspects of my own personality. Weird was based on someone I knew in Chicago. Dirty Dragon was based on a good friend I had in Indianapolis.

By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.

You know, I think everything I do cinematically for the rest of my life will probably have some direct route back to Jonathan. But I love him to death. He's like my best friend and my big brother.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

I vividly remember my sixth-grade classroom. I remember what it smelled like, where I sat, what I could see out the window, and how I felt about things. Peel away my decrepit middle-aged exterior, and an important part of me is still twelve years old. It helps me when I sit down to write stories for kids.

You know, all writers are vampires and they'll look around and they watch you when you're not even thinking they're watching you and they'll slip stuff in.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.

I write books for young adults because I truly connect with them on some very deep level. They are our hope, our future, and inspiring them to be the best they can be is very important to me.

I'm inspired by nonmusical things a lot, whether it's a film or a book or whatever.

My first love was reading, which inspired me to write.

Sometimes you have to search for inspiration with characters, and other times, they just drop out of the sky and arrive.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

Books and movies inspire me, but I do my best to keep my stories as original as possible.

Many books that you read, they have those disclaimers that say that, "None of the events and none of the people are based on real life" and so on... Well, I don't believe that. I think that as human beings many people touch us, especially people we love the most and we can't help but do character sketches when we go to our art.

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.

Imagination is the most powerful tool you have. You learn it from all the greats. The Star Wars films are secretive. Anything J.J. Abrams does is secretive. Those guys haven't done too poorly.

If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.

The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.

Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.