My Students Quotes

#1. When I am performing, I try to follow the advice I give to my students. This can be very hard - I was never a good student and I find I'm no better when I am the teacher.

Jeff Raz

#2. You might like that one. But I'll tell you the same thing I tell my students when they complain about the depressing nature of American literature: life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly ( ... )

Matthew Quick

#3. In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature.

Nicholas Carr

#4. I see myself only sporadically as a teacher and consistently as a writer. Teaching is how I pay the bills ... and fortunately, for my students, I can intellectualize about writing, and I can talk about it well, and I like to talk about it.

Vijay Seshadri

#5. There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.

Edward Hirsch

#6. The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'

Lorrie Moore

#7. I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.

Thom Gunn

#8. I've learned a lot about writing from listening to my students talk.

Marilynne Robinson

#9. I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.

Dorothy Allison

#10. My first Kickstarter project created a book called 'Clear and Present Thinking', a college-level textbook on logic and critical reasoning, which was made available to the world for free. As a professor myself, I observed that the price of textbooks was too high for some of my students.

Brendan Myers

#11. The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

Orhan Pamuk

#12. With my students, I don't offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative's themes can lay bare a narrative's tensions.

Edan Lepucki

#13. When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?

David Sedaris

#14. In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.

Luke Rhinehart

#15. Nglish teachers often take a right-wrong stance. I'd rather my students take a thinking stance.

Jeff Anderson

#16. I tell my students not to be frightened; in the history of Buddhism-for 2,500 years-no one has broken or fractured a leg because of sitting in meditation.

Guo Jun

#17. I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren't that motivated.

Jack Canfield

#18. The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university.

Colin Wilson

#19. I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

Cate Marvin

#20. I tell my students, 'It's an important tradition and you have to go back and hear this music and learn its language all the way through. How are you going to know what's new to play, if you haven't listened to everything that's old?'

Jackie McLean

#21. I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time - I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, 'Actually, this is a valid pastime.'

Rachel Cusk

#22. When my muffin top makes an appearance after a dedicated weekend of pizza indulging, when I feel too tired to write and all my words sound boring, when my students aren't laughing at my jokes, I am still enough.

Michelle Elaine Kennedy

#23. People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.

Azar Nafisi

#24. When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#25. Creativity, my students learn, is as natural a function of the mind as breathing or digestion are natural functions of the body.

John Kao

#26. Mrs. Kooshof's intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention span, the appetite limited to linearity. Too much Melrose Place.)

Tim O'Brien

#27. I tell my students, it's got to be warm, dry, and noble.

Samuel Mockbee

#28. Many of my students assume that government protection is the only thing ensuring decent wages for most American workers. But basic economics shows that competition between employers for workers can be very effective at preventing businesses from misbehaving.

Christina Romer

#29. But I was open to anything my students wanted to do, refusing to accept the idea that a teacher should confine his teaching to the classroom when so much was at stake outside it.

Howard Zinn

#30. As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.

Parker J. Palmer

#31. He is the same chap who informed me that there are unusually high numbers of Mennonites who suffer from depression but nobody knows why. I said, Well, thank you for that! As cheerfully as if I was accepting a plate of homemade Christmas cookies from one of my students.

Miriam Toews

#32. But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

Julia Alvarez

#33. Sometimes war is necessary to teach us the value of peace. Sometimes you need to learn the real value of diplomacy in avoiding war. And I'd rather my students learned those lessons on the playground than on the battlefield.

Neil Gaiman

#34. I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.

Kathy Acker

#35. When I talk with my students, I introduce a process of work I call the three R's: First comes research, then real world exploration, and finally, and perhaps most important, a fact-checking review of all that has been written.

Lee Gutkind

#36. I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.

Josef Albers

#37. I found with my students they don't necessarily look at journals any more, but they print right away from the internet what's relevant to what's he doing you see.

Ahmed H. Zewail

#38. I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

Andrea Barrett

#39. One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status.

James W. Pennebaker

#40. I also have my backpack of the tried-and-true, and because it is new to [my students], it becomes fresh to me again as well.

Dorianne Laux

#41. I used to teach writing in a federal prison, and for my students' benefit, I would liken the narrative use of this highly personal point of view to a boxer's getting in close to his opponent.

Norman Lock

#42. How do you manage your online identity? It's something I talk about with my students all the time.

Hasan M. Elahi

#43. Do not look so happy. I tell you ahead of time. All my students despise me.

Jandy Nelson

#44. My students frequently ask what their next project should be. My advice: immerse yourself in the music you love and you will find what you want to do; you will discover your next project.

Lukas Foss

#45. My happiness comes from doing all I can for my students. To help them, what else could there be?

Frederick Lenz

#46. I want my students to love to read. Reading is not a subject. Reading is a foundation of life, an activity that people who are engaged with the world do all the time

Rafe Esquith

#47. I loved the idea of making history interesting for kids! When Scholastic approached me about 'The 39 Clues', I immediately started going through the 'greatest hits' from my years as a social studies teacher, and picked the historical characters and eras that most appealed to my students.

Rick Riordan

#48. As I often tell my students, the person you'll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally.

Adyashanti

#49. I always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It's really harder if you've already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren't working.

Yiyun Li

#50. Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn't writing for kids. I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right.

Rick Riordan

#51. The Nobel Prize is given as a personal award but it also honors the field of research in which I have worked and it also honors my students and colleagues.

Robert Hofstadter

#52. My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you'll do to a great extent means choosing who you'll be.

Maureen Corrigan

#53. I was a student of Sanford Meisner for three years at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and I studied with Lee Strasburg for five years and became a member of the Actors Studio. What I studied came right from the horse's mouth. My students have a lot to learn from me, and I am so eager to share it.

Lainie Kazan

#54. I take my fearless approach into my teaching by helping my students to realize their potential through yoga. I have a gift for making difficult poses accessible and reminding people that postures, and anything in life, are only as hard as you make them out to be.

Kathryn Budig

#55. My students often say, 'My roommate read this story and really liked it,' and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, 'Well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something.'

Joyce Carol Oates

#56. When I sit with my students and meditate with them, I channel the kundalini directly into them. I bring them to plane after plane of consciousness. What they would do in 100 years of meditation, I can do in an hour with them.

Frederick Lenz

#57. I also talk a lot in Deeper Reading about the importance that confusion plays. When my students come to me, they think confusion is bad. They are wrong. Confusion is the place where learning occurs.

Kelly Gallagher

#58. I taught. I lectured at universities. I spoke to my students. I spoke in certain public forums. But what I didn't do was respond to microphones being thrust in my face and saying, what is your relationship with Obama and are you an unrepentant terrorist?

Bill Ayers

#59. Quitters never win and winners never quit. This is what I teach my students on a daily basis. I encourage my students to never give up.

Pamela G. Bowers

#60. One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.

John Barth

#61. The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers.

David Sedaris

#62. I told my students that the greatest liability they will have is old saints who never matured,

Neil T. Anderson

#63. Give more than you receive. That is the principle I tell all my students.

B.K.S. Iyengar

#64. I started thinking about my relationship with my students; I'm this guy who comes in from book - and movie - land and descends on angel wings into their classroom.

Richard Price

#65. I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing, to their grandmothers, then they probably don't understand it themselves.

Gunter Blobel

#66. I do all I can to let my students feel as normal as possible, as far from institutionalized. I see how easy it is to allow this conveyor belt of incarceration bring them from my facility to an adult detention, often for the rest of their lives.

Thomm Quackenbush

#67. Technology is mostly a force for good, but it has its downsides, too. I want my students - and my readers - to be intelligently skeptical about technology and be informed about the good and the not-so-good parts.

Brian Kernighan

#68. Then there are most of my students who don't know a whole lot about love. You don't know what fun love is. I will remain inaccessible to you until you learn how to love.

Frederick Lenz

#69. Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, 'Will it bring you nearer to God?'

Isidor Isaac Rabi

#70. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they'll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered while at school. If they don't figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.

Clayton Christensen

#71. My students tell me, we don't want to love! We're tired of being loving! And I say to them, if you're tired of being loving, then you haven't really been loving, because when you are loving you have more strength.

Bell Hooks

#72. I had many moments of disappointment, despondency, and exhaustion, but I always found that by reading the literature and showing up at my lab looking at the data as they emerged day by day and discussing them with my students and postdoctoral fellows, I would gain a notion of what to do next.

Eric Kandel

#73. The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book.

Edmund White

#74. My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.

Thomm Quackenbush

#75. My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!

Marya Hornbacher

#76. I decided to go to Latin America because many of my students in Washington emigrated from this region and inspired me to learn more about their home countries.

Jenna Bush

#77. I talk about it a lot to my students. Musicality never came up in any of own writing education, and I can see why - we don't have the vocabulary for it. Phrasing is intuitive, and its difficult to articulate when it's on and when it's not.

Paul Lisicky

#78. I teach my students that you can't be a journalist if you are going to be judgmental. If you have a judgmental nuance as you pose a question, people will close down.

Robert S. Boynton

#79. But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.

Richard Peck

#80. I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories.

Molly Antopol

#81. I have no doubt that 'On the Road' is a Great American Novel. But I'm also certain my students will do fine without it.

Tony D'Souza

#82. I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.

Jayne Anne Phillips

#83. I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

Joe Meno

#84. Many of the people I work with I've worked with in other lifetimes. I moved to California because I knew that many of my students from past lives were in California.

Frederick Lenz

#85. I always forgave my students, like Jesus.

Bikram Choudhury

#86. I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions.

Alan Dundes

#87. I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

Jorge Luis Borges

#88. I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.

George Wald

#89. I tell my students, if you are going to spend days and months and years with someone, you had better like that person!

Susan Nagel

#90. I thought I would teach my students a thing or two from the text books once I got a job in school but to my surprise my students teach me things about life and myself every single day.

Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

#91. I've been a novelist since 1995 and have had novels in and out of option, and watching that process just made me realize that I have to live by what I teach my students, because I teach screenwriting at Spellman.

Tananarive Due

#92. I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.

Marlon James

#93. I think many of my students have followed the advice I gave years ago, to give more than you take.

B.K.S. Iyengar

#94. I don't teach my students, I provide the circumstances in which they can learn.

Albert Einstein

#95. I can't force my students to learn and mature academically, socially, and emotionally. But I can offer incredible experiences that make them eager to learn.

Paul Solarz

#96. Maybe Justin, my students, spoiled me for people my own age, usually so boring, talking about their endless health problems, pros/cons of being cremated, not realizing they're already dead in the most tragic way.

Alma Luz Villanueva

#97. Use your imagination," I tell my students these days, "or someone else is going to use it for you.

Ronald Sukenick

#98. Zazen's music is composed in other dimensions and it is played by some of my students. I go through the music they have played with my aura and wash out anything impure.

Frederick Lenz

#99. For one thing, I teach my students what my teacher for twenty years, Paul Gavert, told me, 'The voice follows ... the voice follows everything about you ... who you are.'

Betty Buckley

#100. Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.

Azar Nafisi