Beverly Cleary Quotes

It's kind of a test when you read a novel thinking about its potential for the screen: How does it play on your mind's screen?

I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.

The interesting thing is, when you play a real-life character or someone based in a book, you always come up against people's preconceptions of what they have in their heads.

I don't tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.

I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

With writing fiction, I'm either not courageous enough or just not suited for telling truths in a more conventional way. As an actor, I inhabit those characters as I'm writing them.

You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

What I really like doing is storytelling, finding the body language that is necessary for the story. And when I'm doing it and it's working, I'm thrilled.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

I like to build a character, trying to stretch my imagination as far to the walls of my brain as I can to come up with something that feels truthful and feels real - as close to the skin as I can get it.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Originally, I thought, 'Gollum's such a fantastic character, why are you doing him CG? Surely you need to be able to humanise him as much as possible - he's so full of pathos and real emotion.'

You get very possessive about characters, you feel you can see it in your mind and you want to play it.

So much of what I do... is coming up with new characters and trying to invent voices for them, and to have people fully fleshed out in my head and to know who can say what in the scene and who these characters are... I love it.

I love thinking of cartoon characters feeling really real feelings. And I love to do that, not just as a fan, but as a creator, so if people want to look for those levels, they're actually there.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

Mr. Disney and his staff were constantly scouting for great stories to bring to life on film.

There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.

Interestingly that some of the characters did not turn out the way Jim and Allen had envisioned them.

I very seldom, very seldom, even know what my characters look like.

When I read books, I actually really love imagining whomever I want to in the character's role. I get such vivid pictures on my own that that is a big part of the experience for me.