Alex Sharp Quotes

I have no schooling in any normal sense but have learned from the best as far as just doing things. I learned filmmaking from loving movies and then just saying, 'OK, let's do it.'

You can learn from everyone, the president or the cleaner. You need teachers in life, but they're not always school teachers or professors. You learn from ordinary people. You learn from travel, from just walking down the street.

I wrote my novel 'Bitter Greens' as the creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts and am now looking at the history of the Rapunzel tale as my theoretical component.

I'm not a prophet. I'm not a teacher. I have no degrees. My degree is from the University of Life.

I didn't go to high school. I think that after you learn to read and write and do your numbers and flush the toilet behind yourself, you don't need no more schoolin'. You need to get out in the water and swim.

Learning by doing is the only way I know how to learn.

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

The greatest teacher I know is the job itself.

There's a difference between knowing what's on the page in a history book and actually feeling that page have curves and valleys.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

I went to an inner-city school in Buffalo. We had no money. But our teachers believed in hands-on active learning - there was a mandatory science fair, which was critical.

I have been blessed to have had many excellent teachers. The further I get away from school, though, the more I realize that the greatest teachers in my life have come from outside of academia.

People should have freedom in their pilgrimages and tours. They should come and visit historical monuments and sites - let's say the sites around Iran - where they can easily engage in wide- scale contacts with others.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

In many ways, a degree in the history of ideas is the ideal training for an aspiring writer.

I'm all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Events sometimes are the biggest teachers, as opposed to words, lectures, and that kind of thing.

I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

Are any of us self-taught? It just means I didn't go to school for it. But you do have teachers. You have mentors.

You can go to school and learn and that works for some people. But I think the best kind of learning is practical and learning on the job.

The kids have got their iPads, but they prefer to get out climbing trees and coming out with me. That's the kind of learning I want them to have: experiences.

The real answers aren't in textbooks; they can be found through experiences.

There's nothing more liberating about starting with something that is not written. You pretty much create the history of that character and that character's life story.

When I'm writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I'm watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don't immerse myself in whatever's going on in whatever area I'm working in.