Quotes & Sayings About Teaching Writing

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

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

I had thrived in Miss Popham's class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best way to organize a literature class in high school if the goal is to encourage wide reading and the love of books. My own best teaching in high school reflected my attempts to replicate the spirit of that 1943 class — James Gray

What I like about teaching is the discipline of finding words to unpack the artistic process. And I admire the drive in students who want to write, the mystery of how artistic talent unfolds. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

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

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

Different instructors' approaches may 'clash' with each other and result in confusion and unclear direction for the students. It's like attempting to learn how to write using both hands at the same time. How far would you go? — Igor Babailov

So they gave me love in form of poison and tiny little pills, programming my emotions, teaching me how to feel. To act correct and talk correct and answer without knowing the question, because that, my dear, is how you get love. Yes that, dear youth, is how you'll be loved. I tried to medicate my own fucked up little mind with chemicals and adrenaline, tasting sweeter every night, shaking louder every time. Sitting wide awake in bed until the world disappears, writing poetry to concentrate on something real while waiting for the love to arrive.
I've been looking for it night after night, waiting patiently for it to show up, maybe somewhere in between the state of awake and asleep, alive and not so alive, sober and not so sober.
(I lost track of the difference somewhere in between.) — Charlotte Eriksson

I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it's nice to be wanted as a writer. — Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

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

[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

I discovered John Truby ten years ago when a friend told me about his screenwriting course. I studied Truby's principles for a year and
using them
I wrote the first draft of The Thieves of Ostia in two weeks. I go back to his teachings before each new book I write. Each time I study Truby, I learn something new. — Caroline Lawrence

I do less of that stuff now because I figured out that when I was writing things I didn't care about, it made me angry and depressed, so I turned my focus to what does make me happy, and also I recognized that one of the things that gives me great happiness is teaching creative writing, and so I could write profiles of professional golfers or I could be a professor. Being a professor made me much happier. — Tod Goldberg

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

Many adult book authors supplement their income by teaching at the college level. Full-time professors fare well, but pay for adjunct professors is notoriously shabby. Children's book authors have a sweeter deal. We're invited by schools, libraries, law firms, and Fortune 500 companies to share our best writing tips and strategies. — Kate Klise

The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking. — Allan Lokos

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it. — Fulton J. Sheen

In the end I created a career of my own, concentrating on my writing and lecturing, reaching larger audiences than I would had I ended up with tenure and a full teaching load. It was Virginia Woolf who said that it is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition-but even more terrible to be frozen into it. — Michael Parenti

When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I've been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen. — Dan Chaon

I had wanted for so many years to feel that writing really was at the center of my life, not something I did in my spare time. So the writing and teaching feel in some way to be one thing - the personal engagement and the social engagement good partners. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

Some people are better at maths than others: no one thinks you can be 'taught' to be a mathematical genius. And no one thinks of teaching, in that context, as a kind of forcing of the will. But there seems to be an idea of writing as an intuitive pastime which is being dishonestly subjected to counterintuitive methods. — Rachel Cusk

My secret for writing is going back to clarity. I'm very clear about what I want to accomplish-the goal-and then the next two are focus and concentration. And I've probably spent my whole life both practicing those two and teaching them. Focus. Focus on a single point and concentration. And concentrating on a single thing till it's done. — Brian Tracy

Well, the traveling teachers do come through every few months," said the Baron.
"Yes, sir, I know, sir, and they're useless, sir. They teach facts, not understanding. It's like teaching people about forests by showing them a saw. I want a proper school, sir, to teach reading and writing, and most of all thinking, sir, so people can find what they're good at, because someone doing what they really like is always an asset to any country, and too often people never find out until it's too late. — Terry Pratchett

Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life. — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing. — Marguerite Young

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

A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. — Richard Hugo

And speaking of this wonderful machine:
[840] I'm puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He's in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,
The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,
And thus it physically guides the phrase
Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain
Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will
Can interrupt, while the automaton
Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before. — Vladimir Nabokov

I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices. — Barbara Kruger

If I could make money making armpit farts, I would. But since I can't, I teach. And write. — Richard B. Knight

As with many teens, my first jobs included babysitting and mopping floors at McDonald's. Since then, I've held jobs a diverse as selling used cars, selling apparel, cosmetics, and real-estate, substitute-teaching six graders, teaching undergraduate creative writing, and working as an editorial assistant for a literary magazine. — Therese Fowler

My purpose in beginning the John Wimber biography project was to honor his rich legacy of teaching, his extraordinary character, and the positive & beneficial impact his life has had on my journey as a 'follower of Christ'. I esteem John Wimber's teachings, writing, and impact upon the Body of Christ to be equal with that of C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, John F. Banks, D.L. Moody, and Leanne Payne. — R. Alan Woods

I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic. — Shelley Berman

Curiously, the balance seems to come when writing is woven into every aspect of my life, like eating or exercising - one flows constantly into the next: I'll wake up and have coffee, read the news, then write a letter or two (always in longhand), then go teach, and after teaching write a bit in a journal - dreams, what I had for breakfast and lunch and why I had it, what's on the iPod, sexual habits, etc. - then read a bit, then work on a real bit of writing ... you get the idea. — Kevin Keck

Title: Teaching Writing Based on Journaling Concepts of Thoreau Thesis: Information processing generates active students. My thesis is to engage in remembering place. Through my own experience of basing my newest novel entitled The Passing Light on my own travel diary, I create strategies based on the travel journaling of Thoreau. My students create E- journals as primary sources for essays. Writing based on keen observation and self discovery is a part of learning to write. — Maryann Diedwardo

This is the first significant mention of an idea that will acquire an almost unbearable, next to mindless authority in European writing: the theme of Europe teaching the Orient the meaning of liberty, which is an idea that Chateaubriand and everyone after him believed that Orientals, and especially Muslims, knew nothing about. Of liberty, they know nothing; of propriety, they have none: force is their God. When they go for long periods without seeing conquerors who do heavenly justice, they have the air of soldiers without a leader, citizens without legislators, and a family without a father.83 — Edward Said

Imagine Eminem writing a play with complex raps and syllables, and melodies flowing in and out. That's what it was like for me listening to Lin-Manuel Miranda, it was incredible. So it just goes to show that if you put your teaching style in a certain form, that will attract the attention of the people you are trying to teach. — Ryan Montgomery

In some ways the goals of teaching and writing are the same. You hope to connect to someone else, to make them care about what you care about. So that the things which matter, the things that matter to you, matter to them. — P.F. Kluge

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

I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I hope to continue writing. I hope to continue teaching. — Jenna Bush

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

What we found developing at Gustavus Adolphus was a sense that we should all be sharing the responsibility for teaching writing. We formed a writing committee that consisted of professors from many different disciplines, and we invited proposals for 'W' courses from the entire faculty. The response was instantaneous. As soon as the ownership of writing by the English department was lost, people in other fields said, 'I'd be willing to give it a try. — William Zinsser

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

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

Plato used the dialogue format because the exchange of views, the posing and answering of questions, showed that understanding is a living, dynamic process. He distrusted writing because the settled character of the written word makes it look as if truth can be fixed and made to stand still. It is worth remembering that this greatest advocate of the objective reality of truth also believed that our access to that truth was sustained in reasoned discussion. — John Churchill, 1st Duke Of Marlborough

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

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

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

Who Am I?
I'm a creator, a visionary, a poet. I approach the world with the eyes of an artist, the ears of a musician, and the soul of a writer. I see rainbows where others see only rain, and possibilities when others see only problems. I love spring flowers, summer's heat on my body, and the beauty of the dying leaves in the fall. Classical music, art museums, and ballet are sources of inspiration, as well as blues music and dim cafes. I love to write; words flow easily from my fingertips, and my heart beats rapidly with excitement as an idea becomes a reality on the paper in front of me. I smile often, laugh easily, and I weep at pain and cruelty. I'm a learner and a seeker of knowledge, and I try to take my readers along on my journey. I am passionate about what I do. I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me. — Sharon M. Draper

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

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture - to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best. — Maxine Kumin

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry. — Robert Morgan

Active critical reflection is necessary in every aspect of our teaching, not only in front of a class. We must try to reevaluate our own values and experiences as they relate to our teaching. Our assumptions and theories about teaching composition must remain open to inspection, evaluation, and revision, a condition that requires an active inquiry paralleling the inquiry in which we engage our students. — George Hillocks

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

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

In teaching writing, I'm learning new things about writing. — David B. Coe

In fact, the very phrase "teaching creative writing" sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative? — Yuriy Tarnawsky

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

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

The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street. — Irvin D. Yalom

If I ever write an autobiography about teaching meditation in the West, I'll call it "Pissing In the Wind - Teaching Buddhism in America". — Frederick Lenz

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

The core of my career is my teaching and my writing. — Elizabeth Warren

I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

It was the end of the October term of my sophomore year, and everything was petty normal, except for Social Studies, which was no big surprise. Mr. Dimas, who taught the class, had a reputation for unconventional teaching methods. For midterms he had blindfolded us, then had us each stick a pin in a map of the world and we got to write essays on wherever the pin stuck. I got Decatur, Illinois. Some of the guys complained because they drew places like Ulan Bator or Zimbabwe. They were lucky. YOU try writing ten thousand words on Decatur, Illinois. — Neil Gaiman

Teaching writing is a hustle. — Cormac McCarthy

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

he has served for three of his four short years at Payne in administration, directing the undergraduate writing center and the much contested/maligned composition program. (No reasonable person outside a university would believe the teaching of composition to be controversial, but of course it is.) Professor West has an open-door policy — Julie Schumacher

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

The point of the resurrection ... is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die ... What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it ... What you do in the present - by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself - will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it ... ). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom. — N. T. Wright

(on teaching writing)
So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well - but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of 'why am I writing' and 'what am I saying' and 'how do I keep it honest. — Celine Kiernan

But the important thing is that I don't do anything else. I avoid social life normally associated with publishing. I don't go to the cocktail parties, I don't give or go to dinner parties. I need that time in the evening because I can do a tremendous amount of work then. And I can concentrate. When I sit down to write I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can't afford it ... — Toni Morrison

Teaching English and teaching Writing are two separate things. — Vanna Bonta

I think I've become more like my mom just because of what we're both interested in, children and teaching and writing. — Jenna Bush

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. — William Faulkner

Stop being part of the social norms of writing and teaching, which then leads to the point, stop being a capitalist person, one who works for a salary to teach writing in a form that's acceptable to capitalism, which then leads further to the point, exit social norms imposed upon you, do not have a lifestyle that requires living by capitalist rules even outside the teaching and practice of writing - which ultimately is the only way to a real literary community, which is based on real art, and you see how impossible a track I'm on? — Anis Shivani

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

I would probably have been very content as a scholar to have carried on organising exhibitions and writing books and teaching. — Thomas P. Campbell

I love the students - they are remarkable, inspiring people. I would miss teaching if I stopped doing it. The kind of work I do is pretty diverse: I can cast a play while doing a polish of a screenplay, while thinking about a new play and revising another. In other words, the kind of work that I do during my work day is not just writing, yet it is all part of the job of being a playwright. — Donald Margulies

I'm very involved on a lot of levels in making of this album," "I wrote on 11 of the 12 tracks which is, creatively, really important to me. I want to be singing my music passionately and when I'm writing from a place where God has been teaching me something new-when I write from that place-it comes across when I'm singing. That's vital to the message and the reality of God that I want to impart with my music. — Rebecca St. James

We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor. Other interested citizens groups have not hesitated to review, analyze and criticize textbooks and teaching materials. — Lewis F. Powell Jr.

I do not need any writing, since I transmit teaching beyond words and ideas. — Bodhidharma

A student brings something to discuss, saying, "I don't know whether this is really good, or whether I should throw it in the wastebasket." The assumption is that one or the other choice is the right move. No. Almost everything we say or think or do - or write - comes in that spacious human area bounded by something this side of the sublime and something above the unforgivable. — William Stafford

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

Study Chairman Mao's writings, follow his teachings and act according to his instructions. — Lin Biao

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them. — Robert Frost

Calpurnia was to blame for this. It kept me from driving her crazy on rainy days, I guess. She would set me a writing task by scrawling the alphabet firmly across the top of a tablet, then copying out a chapter of the Bible underneath. If I reproduced her penmanship satisfactorily, she rewarded me with an open-faced sandwich of bread and butter and sugar. In Calpurnia's teaching, there was no sentimentality: I seldom pleased her and she seldom rewarded me. "Everybody — Harper Lee

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

When a person sets out to learn from others and not to teach others he becomes a true writer. — Carla H. Krueger

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one. — Ludwig Feuerbach

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

My entire adult life has been devoted to family and career, each adding to the other in many rewarding ways. I have never felt that I had to set a pattern for my writing and teaching. — Sonia Levitin

We need to step up our teaching so that our youth do more on their own to understand the doctrines of Christ and the reality of the Restoration, and we need to find a way to motivate them to write these things on the 'tablets of their hearts.' — Bonnie L. Oscarson

Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer! — Gerry Abbey

I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: 'A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.' I do believe that. Not superior to all other people, but to some, most probably including those who think Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is a great film. That is not simply ego on my part. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than 40 years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy. — Roger Ebert

The initial motive for developing APL was to provide a tool for writing and teaching. Although APL has been exploited mostly in commercial programming, I continue to believe that its most important use remains to be exploited: as a simple, precise, executable notation for the teaching of a wide range of subjects. — Kenneth E. Iverson