Teaching Writing Quotes

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

Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks. ~ Paul Samuelson

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

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

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

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

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

If you want to change people by talking about God, then there is only one way: instead of teaching God, you must live God. Because: "teaching" God is unthinkable in any other way than the way you would teach love or poetry. You teach love only through love, poetry only through writing poetry, faith in God only through a contagious way of trusting. ~ Eugen Drewermann

Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work. ~ Michel De Montaigne

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

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

Remember that one day, you will die and nothing that you studied, thought of or wished to do, will ever matter. Your only contribution that would matter is how you shared your knowledge, insights, and wisdom through teaching, writing, or other comprehensible means. ~ Rajesh`

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

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

MindSparks has produced some of the best materials on the market for teaching students how to read and write history with intellectual integrity and depth. Rarely have I come across curriculum so useful in helping students become literate, thinking citizens. Bravo. ~ Sam Wineburg

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I saw quite clearly in the '80s, before the internet, was that the whole world was shifting toward digital formats, and that didn't matter whether it's movies or writing or whatever. It was something that was coming. And with the invention of the World Wide Web in the early '90s, when we were teaching our first courses, or the arrival of the internet by way of the browser, which opened up the internet to everybody - soon it was just revolutionary. ~ Robert Coover

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'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

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

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

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

Besides writing, I have been teaching myself to 'develop' my own photographic plates, and I haven't a stick of clothing or an exposed finger that isn't stained. I sit for hours in a dark-room feeling as if I were a very elderly Faust at some dreadful incantation, and come out of it, blinding at the light, like a Bastille prisoner. And yet I am not successful! ~ Bret Harte

So many people think that social studies and weird lessons in social studies, teaching kids in America are bad, is it the result of Common Core? And it's not. It's not. Common Core does not deal with social studies. It's basically writing and math. ~ Megyn Kelly

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

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

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

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

But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths. ~ Carl Eckart

Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away - live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else.
Explaining is where we all get into trouble. ~ Richard Ford

I guess what attracted me about the philosophy aspect was that it was realistic. It didn't go off into the realm of imagination land, which I find a lot of religious teachings, actually almost every religious teaching does. I keep meaning to write this up as a blog post, but lately, while driving in my car I've been listening to a religious station that comes on out of Cleveland from the Moody Bible Institute. ~ Brad Warner

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

(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

Can writing ever be taught? The best answer to that was given obliquely by the rock musician David Lee Roth. When asked if money could buy happiness he said, no, but with money you could buy the big boat and go right up to where the people were happy. With a teacher you can go right up to where the writing is done; the leap is made alone with vision, subject, passion, and instinct. So a writer comes to the page with vision in her heart and craft in her hands and a sense of what a story might be in her head. How do the three come together? My thesis is the old one: they merge in the physical writing - inside the act of writing, not from the outside. The process is the teacher. ~ Ron Carlson

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane Porter's cursive writing. ~ T.K. Naliaka

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

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

Jarrid Wilson has a passion and heart for God that is contagious. His genuine faith comes through powerfully in his teaching and writing. 30 Words points to the God of all wonder and grace in a way that will expand your faith and experience of God. ~ Jud Wilhite

Over time I learned that there are two very different satisfactions that you can have in your life. One is the satisfaction of becoming skilled at something. It almost doesn't matter what the terrain is. There is a deep, soul-feeding resonance in mastery itself, whether in teaching, writing a complicated software program, coaching a baseball team, or marshalling a group of people to start a new business ... ~ Atul Gawande

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

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words. ~ Anthony Doerr

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

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

We were on a tour, and there were some chord formations that were tough for me to play when I was a kid ... it had become apparent that there was some stuff I wanted to do that [would require me] to learn how to do that. So I wrote the song and used some of these chord formations so I would have to play them. I thought it would be a great teaching vehicle for a while, and it was, but it ended up as a performance song. ~ Jorma Kaukonen

Teaching writing is a hustle. ~ Cormac McCarthy

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

Looking back, I understand that I was teaching myself to write. ~ Mary Wesley

They [academy writing programs] have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you're not constantly looking at your education model and adjusting for the change, you'll find yourself teaching antiquity. Like all of these programs that won't accept students who are writing genre fiction - what an institutional ego! ~ Tod Goldberg

James Franco, acting, teaching, directing, writing, producing, photography, soundtracks, editing - is there anything you can do? ~ Natasha Leggero

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

I earn my living by teaching film, mostly filmmaking but also teaching courses on current cinema. I'm interested in movies. I hope that's not all I'm interested in. In that sense, it's maybe a little misleading. I don't expect to make another movie about films, but I may continue to write about them. ~ Thom Andersen

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

Without children, men have more liberty to earn less - that is, they are free to pursue more fulfilling and less lucrative careers, like writing or art or teaching social studies. ~ Warren Farrell

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

I don't know which is worse - to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those roadblocks removed from its path. If you don't think cheaply, then there at least won't be the quality of cheapness in your writing, even though you may not be able to write well. The teacher can try to weed out what is positively bad, and this should be the aim of the whole college. Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn't require his attention. ~ Flannery O'Connor

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

When you're researching you're learning. When you're writing, you're teaching. ~ Susan Orlean

A man would have to be an idiot to write a book of laws for an apple tree telling it to bear apples and not thorns, seeing that the apple-tree will do it naturally and far better than any laws or teaching can prescribe. ~ Martin Luther

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

My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table. I think that's a mistake, in obvious opposition to the ideal of teaching which permits a student to be someone other than the teacher ... The successful teacher has to make each of the students a different product rather than the same. ~ Nicholas Delbanco

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

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

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion. ~ Tobias Wolff

I walked past the stable and carriage house. The path took me cross the whole map of the world I knew. I hadn't yet seen the spinning globe in the house that showed the rest of it. p7 ~ Sue Monk Kidd

I knew a teacher that kept a calendar on his desk. He didn't use it for lesson planning though. Instead he was marking time until summer. That's what prisoners do on walls. They mark the days until they go free. But if you're marking time as a teacher, you aren't redeeming the time with your students. A parent drops a child off at the beginning of the year and it's your job to redeem the time and educate that child. It's your responsibility to see that child progress throughout the year. The child should be a better student as a result of being in your classroom. You are responsible - for successes and failures - and you have an obligation to students and parents to redeem every precious minute you're given as an educator. ~ Tucker Elliot

I would want to travel the world and write about it. To be a famous writer. ~ Shantel VanSanten

I write for myself first and foremost, but I hope that others will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. ~ Shannon DuBey

Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night. ~ William Shakespeare

The goal of teaching is learning, not teaching. ~ Hugo Rossi

Be fearless. Write what you want. Write how you want. Create art. ~ Beth Revis

Our world needs less gurus, and more teachers. Gurus are about helping themselves become successful. Teachers are about helping others become successful. ~ Joseph C. Kunz Jr.

New country music comprises about five percent of what I hear per year. I enjoy it, but I don't really take note of who's singing it or writing it. ~ Rivers Cuomo

I was writing tons of music in my spare time. I might be on location somewhere, and I'd go home and I'd have my guitar and my little keyboard or something and write music. Or if I was at home, on my piano. I've always been a late bloomer with a lot of things, just in general, so I think this was something that needed to come to fruition in this particular way. ~ Zooey Deschanel

Did you seriously just use the word 'loins'? ~ J.D. Cunegan

The evening's light, silvery, casts its dull brightness onto the trees--trees gelid in this blue light of winter. But whiteness dominates with the pines and evergreens steeped in vibrant grades of silver. I hear notes in the mist, like silvery chattering, coins in a pocket, the jangle of keys. Pg 217 ~ S.K. Kalsi

It's a myth that older writers can't write for younger audiences. Shakespeare wasn't 15 when he wrote Romeo and Juliet. ~ Tracy Keenan Wynn

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975) ~ P.G. Wodehouse

If you want to write, then write; if you don't want to write, then don't write. I fell into the former category, and I just made the decision that I'd keep on because I liked it and might someday do something decent. ~ Ben Fountain

Anything said is gone as soon as it leaves my lips. Things written down at least have a chance to leave a soft echo of what had been. ~ Chris Dietzel

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway? ~ Sue Monk Kidd

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story. ~ George R R Martin

It's difficult to put your own bare ass out on the limb every time you sit down to write a poem. But that's really sort of the ideal. Because if we don't discover something about ourselves and our world in the making of a poem, chances are it's not going to be a very good poem. So what I'm saying is that a lot of our best poets could be better poets if they wrote less and risked more in what they do. ~ Sam Hamill

My life in general, orderly or not, it allows me more freedom in my own writing. Sometimes I wonder, though - I have friends that sit around and just write all day. And I think it's the coolest thing. ~ Victoria Chang

I am co-writing a screenplay now and I'm working on the rights to another story I want to do. So I plan to produce and direct. So, for me, I don't really feel that I am vulnerable to that sad baggage that comes with the business of filmmaking. ~ Kerry Washington

Moral writing is boring. ~ Johan Van Wyk

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.
There is my desert. ~ Edmond Jabes

As an undergraduate, I took a theology course titled Religion as Writing. If writing can be considered a form of faith, then inevitably doubt has to accompany it. ~ Dinaw Mengestu

I write because I have authority from life to do so. ~ Bessie Head

Anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just 'talents.' Hemingway later invented his own form also. The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar. ~ Jack Kerouac

I kind of came from the Townes Van Zandt school of throwing yourself off a cliff and then that's what you write about, and that rule number one of creative writing is you have to have conflict. But if you write about yourself mostly, then if you don't have conflict, then you create it. And the older I get, the more I realize that that's not a very smart way to do this. Not to say I'm the most self destructive person on earth, but it's easy to do. ~ John Fullbright

When you develop software, the people who write the software, the developers are the key group but the testers also play an absolutely critical role. They're the ones who ah, write thousands and thousands of examples and make sure that it's going to work on all the different computers and printers and the different amounts of memory or networks that the software'11 be used in. That's a very hard job. ~ Bill Gates

Our failure as humans becomes illness and lethal when we cling to our differences.
Of tribes, races and class. Of religion, cultures and gender.
We forget who we are; blood, skin and bones, hearts, minds and souls. A sick world in need of healing ~ Margaret Sitawa

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song. ~ Bruno Mars

I envisaged a woman of the late nineteenth century marrying into this milieu, finding it unendurable and fleeing back with her child to the more ordinary hazards of London: of that child, given at her christening the ancient Roman name for the island, Sarnia, but reared in ignorance of her paternal background, discovering, after her mother's death, that she was an heiress, and being bidden back to claim her patrimony. Skulduggery followed naturally.
(On the writing of SARNIA) ~ Hilary Ford