Quotes About Learning

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

A person who doesn't learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.

If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming 'Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?

The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they don't have time to read. This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn't belong in a smart people's club.

Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map.... A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it.

Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.

Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

For most of us, I think it's easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the tools to write.

Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There's no feeling on earth like it.

Nothing screws with memory like repetition.

Those who do not learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat it.

The lessons which I remember the longest are always the ones that are self-taught

no knowledge obtained without risk

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being an adult is about learning how to die.

Children learn much more by mute example than by spoken rules, or so it seems to me.

But this wealth of information produced little or no insight.