Rick Riordan Quotes

Don’t preach. Teach.

A pedant holds more to instruct us with what he knows, than of what we are ignorant.

I've never thought my speeches were too long; I've rather enjoyed them.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

The way you communicate an idea is different than the way you communicate a product.

The reason I quit being a sales manager over twenty years now is because I hate elevator pitches. I want to write stories and show people what's in them when they read them, not tell them all about it ahead of time.

Trust me, I have never written a speech in my life, and if I have my way, I never will.

The dai (famous professor) gave many lectures in the Palace, lecturing separately to the adepts, the members of the court, the common people and strangers. To women, he lectured in the Jam-i Azhar, where a separate chamber was allotted to the women of the court

Teachers and parents who incline toward the authoritarian attitude are scornful of “frills.” They consider lecturing, memorization, recitation, and grading to be the basics, as they remember them from their own school days. They believe in withholding promotion form children who have not satisfactorily completed the year’s work in all subjects, despite the evidence that when children are made to repeat a grade, they do not do as well in the following years as similar children who were promoted. To authoritarians, education is not a means to help each child to mature but a series of hurdles over which everyone, of no matter what capability, must jump. A policy of withholding promotion means ignoring the fundamental and complex question of why the children failed and what needs to be done to correct that problem.

If you talk in a way that is too dissimilar to the character, when people are showing up to see you talk about the show, often it seems like it's jarring to them.

You know, master classes are essentially extended Q&As. That's how I always approach them. I don't mean to downplay it. It's just that I never fancy myself as someone who is taking a class. 'Master class' insinuates a teacher, and I'm not one.

A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.

If for the sake of a crowded audience you do wish to hold a lecture, your ambition is no laudable one, and at least avoid all citations from the poets, for to quote them argues feeble industry.

Ay me! sad hours seem long.

I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.

PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple.

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

I'd love most of the movies I make to be four hours long.

I'm a shy, nervous person, and I don't like teaching with "terms." I didn't teach them, like, "This is first person, this is second person, this is foreshadowing," or whatever, so no one probably felt like they were learning anything. But I feel like teaching in that way reduces the concept to a term.

In one thing you have not changed, dear friend," said Aragorn: "you still speak in riddles." "What? In riddles?" said Gandalf. "No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.

Donald Trump has been saying that I think for as long as I've been listening to him of late, and that's what he's going to do.

After one of his [Hubert Humphrey] long-winded harangues I suggested he had probably been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. He responded by saying that I would have been a great success in the movies working for Eighteenth Century-Fox.

In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message.

The best method for a given teacher is the one which is most familiar to the teacher.

It's useless to lecture a human.