Writing Teachers Quotes

#1. Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

P. J. O'Rourke

#2. My natural tendency is to write about zombie bunnies, but one of my first writing teachers got incorporated into my writing superego, and I keep hearing his admonition to make things feel more real the weirder they get.

Chris Adrian

#3. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer.

John Gardner

#4. When a place comes across vividly in a novel, it's often compared to a character. I can remember writing teachers who encouraged me to treat setting as if it were a character, to give it three dimensions, to make it come alive, jump off the page.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

#5. In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.

Will Schwalbe

#6. I did have a love for literature that overpowered my hatred of the people who taught it, and I think because I had no respect for the teachers, their attitude didn't poison the writing that I was discovering for myself.

Craig Ferguson

#7. Characters begin as your children and become your teachers.

Chloe Thurlow

#8. For all its ups and downs and challenges, I love writing. We only grow through adversity, so I welcome the difficulties, knowing bumps in the road are my greatest teachers.

Lori Wilde

#9. My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

George Steiner

#10. Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most beloved Buddhist teachers in the West, a rare combination of mystic, poet, scholar, and activist. His luminous presence and the simple, compassionate clarity of his writings have touched countless lives.

Joanna Macy

#11. I know that I'll be writing for young adults for a long time. Mostly because I just love the readers and the teachers and librarians that I interact with.

Veronica Roth

#12. English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.

Dean Wesley Smith

#13. I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself.

Gerry Abbey

#14. Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!

Gerry Abbey

#15. I had really good English teachers in elementary through high school. Not only were we required to read a lot - which is the best training for writing - we were drilled on grammar every day, every night. I hated the drill part, but I don't dangle my participles too often.

Carol Berg

#16. I would love to see writing taught online because at university like Yale, there are not enough teachers who are able to teach writing well, or in some cases, there are none.

David Gelernter

#17. It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable.

Gerry Abbey

#18. I certainly wasn't born with creative writing. Maybe there's a certain amount of learning and then it's up to the person. I think in the end it's your favourite books that are the best teachers. That's the way I've learned the most, by far.

Markus Zusak

#19. To write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.

Mary Oliver

#20. I believe in teaching as a real job. I don't think it's a substitute for anything else. It's been shown to me that teachers can help, and the writing today is just as good as it was when I started out. Technology hasn't changed that.

Ron Carlson

#21. Among the seventy-three teachers who responded, scores ranged from 50 to 96! Just as Starch and Elliott found a century earlier, scores varied by more than forty-five percentage points - and that's among teachers who received specific professional development in writing assessment!

Thomas Guskey

#22. Teachers say if you write a story you must never name what you're trying to write. Just do it. When it's over you'll know what you've done.

Ray Bradbury

#23. Teaching methods are often inadequate for the goals faculties are trying to achieve. Important courses such as expository writing and foreign languages are frequently taught by untrained graduate students and underpaid adjunct teachers.

Derek Bok

#24. Dear teachers, please make reading and writing fun. Reading and writing shouldn't be a punishment while in school. I ask you to create and teach two electives: "Reading for Pleasure" and "Writing for Pleasure".

Gloria D. Gonsalves

#25. I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.

Avi

#26. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.

Julia Glass

#27. None of my English teachers in college were praising me or telling me I was anything special. But then in creative writing classes they were. And I enjoyed those more anyway.

John Brandon

#28. I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.

Dan Chaon

#29. 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

#30. We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I have grown up with family writing competitions, and I can't remember a birthday or Christmas present that didn't include books.

Alexandra Adornetto

#31. When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.

Bat For Lashes

#32. 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

#33. I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.

Walter Dean Myers

#34. At school I was always trying to con my teachers into letting me act out book reports instead of writing them.

Laura Linney

#35. When I told my teachers I wanted to be a writer, alot of them encouraged me to lower my expectations and to be more realistic. So I rode away on my magical, winged horse, spraying faerie dust behind me, and laughing manically as I went.

M.E. Vaughan

#36. 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

#37. Writing was something I have always been interested in. I've grown up in a household full of books, with both my parents English teachers and very booky.

Alexandra Adornetto

#38. I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

Carolyn Kizer

#39. An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.

Maeve Binchy

#40. A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.

Jay McInerney

#41. Max never intended to be messy with his writing, which he could read just fine, years later if necessary, even if his teachers couldn't. He merely found that his active mind tended to move too fast for his hand to keep up with.

Sol Luckman

#42. Although I was able to study music with teachers, I never studied lyric writing. I read poetry, and I read other lyricists. But they were never writing in the style or the form that I was interested in.

Paul Simon