Quotes About Inspiration

Aim to write for an hour per day. I used to be a teacher, and an hour a day before school was all it took for me to write my first book. Don't get discouraged if a holiday or illness interrupts your writing habit. Just start it up again.

My first career was as a coach and a teacher.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

People can look to me as a teacher, but I consider myself a student of hip-hop.

My ambition in high school was to be a high school coach and teacher, and that's still what I do: teach.

I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment, I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons.

I studied with a blind teacher from about 5 until I was 16, at two different schools. From the age of 12 until 16, I was in a boarding school-which, I believe, at that time was compulsory for blind children.

There was a teacher who recognized that I was interested in cartooning and he was great.

Mike Watt and I had the same teacher. Mr. Tanaka.

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching orders.

Students never think it can be the teacher's fault and so I thought I was stupid. I was frustrated and would come home and cry because I couldn't do it. Then we got a new teacher who made math accessible. That made all the difference and I learned that it's how you present it that makes it scary or friendly.

I think eventually I want to become a teacher, like my father wanted to be, and hopefully positively influence the next generation.

My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me.

I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, 'No, I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher; that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.

My painting teacher in high school used to say, 'I can't paint like I want to, but through practice I'll get better.' But I don't think that's true. I think sometimes you just can't paint.

I did not study science at school until I was 13, when I was totally turned on by a seemingly dreary old teacher who suddenly, unannounced, manufactured a huge explosion in the middle of a totally boring monologue. From then on, all of his class wanted to make explosions.

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.

My mom is an art teacher and is very much into the performing arts. What can I say? She is the female in my life and has guided me on how to act and conduct myself. A lot of my strength comes from her.

As a teacher, I've never seen anything like 'Harry Potter.' That's why I smart when people talk about the 'next' 'Harry Potter.' There is no 'next' 'Harry Potter.'

Teachers can change lives with just the right mix of chalk and challenges.

I'm lucky I had some teachers who saw something in me.

I just want to make a point that it's not just great teachers that sometimes shape your life. Sometimes it's the absence of great teachers that shapes your life and being ignored can be just as good for a person as being lauded.