Teaching Influence Quotes

I got Twin Peaks, and the part was basically written for me, which was a really big shock. I think everything really changed with the right teacher coming together, but before that I worked with Sondra Seacat; she's amazing and very spiritual, but I hadn't worked with her on specific roles. I just was in classes with her.

My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.

My seventeen years of teaching inform my sense of audience in every line I write.

As an undergraduate, I took two writing workshops taught by Elizabeth Hardwick. She was certainly a major influence, though more as a writer I greatly admired than as a teacher. As for other writers, I think it's safe to say that my work has been and continues to be influenced to one degree or another by every writer whose work I love and admire.

What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.

Writing for children hadn't occurred to me when I was younger, but nine years of teaching in the upper elementary grades had given me a deep appreciation of the gifts and graces that are specific to individuals with 10 or 11 years of experience as human beings.

Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.

The last person to teach me how to act was my A-level Theatre Studies teacher at school, which I literally still draw on. Got an A!

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

I've had so much great teaching, and I'm one of the best defensive players to ever play the game on the wing.

My mother was the strength. She was the anchor. She was a preacher and a teacher.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

It's rare that you get to read, let alone teach, an arbitrary canon of your choosing in a tight time setting, and I tore through a fairly wide range of Indian writers, some contemporary - like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie - and others older, like R.K. Narayan. And I think what happened at that stage was that I was forced to take a position in my own writing style that was more fixed, as opposed to reading a book at a time and defining myself in opposition to or in awe of it.

Here, let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true: Teachers? Teachers make a difference! Now what about you?