Terrance Hayes Quotes

I went to university in the north of England at University of Birmingham to do an English literature degree, and I knew I could do extracurricular stuff with theater and drama. I started a theater company, called Article 19, and I did it with a bunch of friends. I wrote and directed plays. I had a radio show.

For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.

I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.

At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city.

I love to write. English is my favorite subject in school.

In junior high, I was still writing poems and stories. In college, I was a journalism major. When I got out of college, I went to work for an educational publisher, so I was still writing, developing curriculums.

I did art history and English literature at Newcastle.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

When I was growing up, the exam system didn't allow you to write fiction, so you never did.

To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.

You have to stay in school. You have to. You have to go to college. You have to get your degree. Because that's the one thing people can't take away from you is your education. And it is worth the investment.

The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.

Literature has always been the greatest fuel for my imagination.

My thesis at school was on Wordsworth.

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.

My first love is literature.

I didn't study writing or drama or anything like that... that was not really a viable route for me.

I did study with Anne Carson briefly in Michigan. She taught there, and that's where I first encountered her, in her class.

I love school, and I love learning, and school really does inspire me for a lot of my writing - just being in public school with people and watching things happen.