Top 100 Quotes About Teaching Writing
#1. I loved teaching. It was my world. I only left because I was overwhelmed with three careers - teaching, writing, and my family.
Patricia Reilly Giff
#3. Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Robert Morgan
#4. If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#5. At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.
Nic Pizzolatto
#6. Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.
Debra Dean
#7. In teaching writing, I'm learning new things about writing.
David B. Coe
#8. In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.
Leni Zumas
#9. Teaching English and teaching Writing are two separate things.
Vanna Bonta
#10. Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
Tobias Wolff
#11. Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.
Ray Bradbury
#13. The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.
Criss Jami
#14. My plan is to continue teaching many more years than the 32 years I've already enjoyed and continue writing, and promoting my books and websites if it's God will.
Ana Monnar
#15. In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize
Arthur Hertzberg
#16. The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.
Muriel Barbery
#17. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#18. With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.
Irvin D. Yalom
#19. Our days are precious but we gladly see them going
If in their place we find a thing more precious growing:
A rare, exotic plant, our gardener's heart delighting;
A child whom we are teaching, a booklet we are writing.
Hermann Hesse
#20. I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.
Rick Riordan
#21. It's a memoir of various events in my own life, but it's also a teaching book: along the way I explain the writing decisions I made. They are the same decisions that confront every writer going in search of his or her past: matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.
William Zinsser
#22. If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.
M.H. Abrams
#23. Writing can be taught or learned in the vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: "This is a how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.
William Zinsser
#24. I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
Erica Jong
#25. ...teaching is like playing jazz. Even if you perform the same number over and over, it never comes out the same twice, and you don't know exactly how it will sound until you hear it. Teaching is like writing with your voice
Earl R. Babbie
#26. I love teaching online at my website and soon I'll be writing a math book. I love to teach math. I just don't have time for a full-time teaching gig. Acting is way too time-consuming.
Danica McKellar
#27. Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.
Aaron Belz
#28. I hope to continue writing. I hope to continue teaching.
Jenna Bush
#29. If I teach you reading and writing, I'm warning you I've got to hit you on the head and call you bad names when you're stupid, because that's how you do teaching.
Louis De Bernieres
#30. I'll never retire as long as I live - that's like retiring from life! I'll never stop writing, teaching, lecturing. If you're in good health, living is exciting on its own.
Bel Kaufman
#31. As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn't even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.
Gerry Abbey
#32. I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.
Joyce Carol Oates
#33. Teaching was great for me, because I got to show people how writing can really change the way you see not only yourself but the world.
Sarah Dessen
#34. I can't teach you how to write, and anybody who says they can is full of shit.
Hank Moody
#35. Writing is the main gig and teaching and performing are sidelines, an excuse for not writing more. Working on a novel and on an opera make me seriously want to retire and find a volunteer job as a docent at the zoo explaining to schoolchildren where frogs go in the winter.
Garrison Keillor
#37. From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.
Garry Disher
#38. In fact, the very phrase "teaching creative writing" sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative?
Yuriy Tarnawsky
#39. I love teaching poetry writing. Students come into the class thinking poetry has to be one way, then leave having created pieces that are wholly original, that have - quite literally - never been made before.
Cate Marvin
#40. Why I find Louis Brandeis so exciting and inspiring because he's teaching us - good legal writing is not a matter of taste, it's a matter of connection with fellow citizens and of democratic education.
Jeffrey Rosen
#41. I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.
William Zinsser
#42. I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.
Shelley Berman
#43. When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?'
Marya Hornbacher
#44. Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.
Andre Dubus
#45. Learning is not the consequence of teaching or writing, but rather of thinking ... so a playful, provocative, unclear but stimulating book could actually be more worth your money than a serious, clear book that tells you what to think but doesn't make you think.
Brian D. McLaren
#46. And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.
Gerry Abbey
#47. I love and always have loved policy issues and trying to have an impact on the issues that are out there. I cherish my years in government. I have loved my participation at CNN, at Current; writing; teaching. Where I will go next, I will have to sort out.
Eliot Spitzer
#48. Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.
Derek Bok
#49. The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking.
Allan Lokos
#50. I'm sure that writing isn't a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can't be taught, it can't be what you use in teaching.
Robert Lowell
#51. The title which I most covet is that of teacher. The writing of a research paper and the teaching of freshman calculus, and everything in between, falls under this rubric. Happy is the person who comes to understand something and then gets to explain it.
Marshall A. Cohen
#52. I have always admired teachers because teaching, like the priesthood, medicine and writing, is a vocation. You don't become a teacher because you want wealth. It is the same with writing.
F. Sionil Jose
#53. For the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching ... by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.
Stephen King
#54. Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching.
Pam Houston
#55. I think that's a part of what motivates me in my teaching and writing. Once the Gospel feels mainstream and becomes a nicely organized, orchestrated belief system, frankly, I don't think there is even an attraction to the human spirit.
Erwin McManus
#56. I'm not Pollyanna - I know that my personality and my opinions and how I approach the teaching of writing maybe isn't exactly how it's done traditionally in the academy ... wherever that academy is ... but, you know, the academy is broken as it relates to many creative writing programs.
Tod Goldberg
#57. I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time.
Mary Balogh
#58. I was teaching myself notes from three and then by seven I'd figured out how to play some chords, and at school I used to love writing poems and poetry, so I guess I kind of put two and two together and that formed my songwriting from an early age.
Ella Henderson
#59. Teaching is a great complement to writing. It's very social and gets you out of your own head. It's also very optimistic. It renews itself every year - it's a renewable resource.
Eleanor Catton
#60. If I were to go back to the Philippines, I would probably end up teaching creative writing at a university. I wouldn't be able to write, for I would become too jaded to be able to view the existing situation objectively.
Miguel Syjuco
#61. Do you need to "find time to teach"? Of course not---you have a teaching schedule, and you never miss it. [...] Finding time is a destructive way of thinking about writing. Never say this again. Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write.
Paul J. Silvia
#62. What I want my father's writing to keep teaching us is that at the table of writing, everyone is welcome. No voice without all voices.
Kim Stafford
#64. I got so tired of hearing those proverbs when I was a child. Now I use them all the time. Sometimes they are the best way to say what needs to be said. I teach them to my students. I have a collection of proverbs for class discussion and writing assignments.
Marva Collins
#65. A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.
Richard Hugo
#66. I started teaching myself guitar because I loved singing so much. Then one day kind of out of the blue I found I was writing a song. It just happened organically.
Kina Grannis
#67. No matter what I write or speak about, it always has some connection to how our spiritual understanding impacts the world we live in. Whether I'm writing or teaching about nutrition, pilates, green living or meditation, all topics simmer down to self thought and intention.
Marianne Williamson
#68. I seem to get totally wrapped up in teaching and working with students during the school year. During the summer, I try to spend time in the real world, writing code for therapy and perhaps for some useful purpose.
Brian Kernighan
#69. I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking.
Nhat Hanh
#70. I would probably have been very content as a scholar to have carried on organising exhibitions and writing books and teaching.
Thomas P. Campbell
#71. My mom's a concert pianist, so she started teaching me when I was around seven. When I was eight, I started writing my own songs, and kinda started putting piano and singing together. But I'm trained classically, which is a big influence on me, I think.
Birdy
#72. I don't take off time from teaching to write. I take time off from writing to teach.
Steven Millhauser
#73. I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.
Kate Zambreno
#74. Teaching Ramanujan was like writing on a blackboard covered with excerpts from a more interesting lecture.
Lawrence Young
#75. A thank-you card," repeated Alice. "Yes. I know, I know, it's teaching them good manners and everything, but I sort of hate those thank-you cards. I always imagine the kids groaning and having to be forced into writing them. It makes me feel like an elderly aunt.
Liane Moriarty
#76. When a person sets out to learn from others and not to teach others he becomes a true writer.
Carla H. Krueger
#77. Writing for children hadn't occurred to me when I was younger, but nine years of teaching in the upper elementary grades had given me a deep appreciation of the gifts and graces that are specific to individuals with 10 or 11 years of experience as human beings.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
#78. I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.
Jane Goodall
#79. I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poets and novelists we read.
Michael Cadnum
#80. Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#81. Underneath the visible problems with reading and writing lies the deeper problem of 'illearnacy': an acquired disabling of learning courage and learning initiative.
Guy Claxton
#82. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.
Howard Zinn
#83. 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
#84. It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.
Fulton J. Sheen
#85. [Satan] has hundreds of agents writing pornographic literature and producing sex movies to pollute [the mind]. He has intellectuals in high positions teaching a hedonistic and permissive philosophy ... They lack an anchor for their real self.
Billy Graham
#86. Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.
Paul Samuelson
#87. But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
Umberto Eco
#88. Words are both my vocation and my avocation - reading, writing, editing, teaching.
Christina Baker Kline
#89. James Franco, acting, teaching, directing, writing, producing, photography, soundtracks, editing - is there anything you can do?
Natasha Leggero
#90. When I realized I wanted to do more writing and less traveling around the world teaching live seminars, I decided to write the first 'Chicken Soup for the Soul(R)' book. I knew I wanted to have 100 stories in the book, so I wrote or edited two stories a week for a year.
Jack Canfield
#91. After I started publishing poetry I got to teach creative writing. Eventually I was promoted and even got tenure. But then I felt compelled to drop everything and move. But I've been teaching for a long time. More than four decades.
Joan Larkin
#92. Worksheets - the archenemy of abundant, purposeful reading (and discussion and writing).
Mike Schmoker
#93. But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.
Orson Scott Card
#94. 'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.
Lynda Barry
#95. I hoped that it would be possible to slide slowly from my public life back to the life of teaching and writing that I had always wanted. But things didn't work out that way.
Charles Van Doren
#96. When I was teaching children I began every day writing this on the blackboard: "Do to others what you would like them to do to you", telling them how much better the world would be if everybody lived by this rule.
Common
#97. This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit.
Erin Morgenstern
#98. Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue.
Bill Ayers
#99. I hate thinking about it, teaching about it, and writing about it. But the plain truth is that hell is real and real people go there for eternity.
Bill Hybels
#100. I do not need any writing, since I transmit teaching beyond words and ideas.
Bodhidharma
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