Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University.

Send it to someone who can publish it. And if they won't publish it, send it to someone else who can publish it! And keep sending it! Of course, if no one will publish it, at that point you might want to think about doing something other than writing.

They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, 'Paint it this color!'

She found me intolerable. But she got to know me, and I wore her down.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.

College had little effect on me. I'd have been the same writer if I'd gone to MIT, except I'd have flunked out sooner.

With so much at stake maybe I'll just leave now.

I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.

I got thrown out of school several weeks in my senior year being caught in the girls' dorm. This was 1954, friends. The girls' dorm was off limits. Even to girls, I think.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

I didn't have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough.

Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition.

Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.

If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it.

I think at this stage in my life I have learned that there are any number of things that men will never know, and can never hope to know, about women.

I write five pages a day. If you would read five pages a day, we'd stay right even.

For David Parker and Daniel Parker, with the respect and admiration of their father, who grew up with them.

My older son who is, I think, here tonight, is forty-one years old. Which is odd because so am I.

I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.

Joan organizes our social life, and on weekends I follow her around.

Well, you give me too much credit for foresight and planning. I haven't got a clue what the hell I'm doing.

'All Our Yesterdays' was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.

Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University.

It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way.

I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show once. It was a really slow news day for Oprah, and there were several of us on 'cause none of us was sufficiently interesting by his or herself.

It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.

This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.

There can never be any substitute for your own palate nor any better education than tasting the wine yourself.

I just had to plod along without having any teaching, which was a pity.

Without In The Company of Men, I could still be teaching, so who knows if this would've existed.

In 1979, I received a phone call from Ansel Adams asking me if I would be willing to consider coming to work for him. I was teaching photography in Southern California at that point.

I think we've got outstanding teaching in Michigan classrooms.

It is normal for politicians in all countries to profess themselves the pupils of history, anxious to draw the right lessons from her teaching.

I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

Teaching was the most pleasant thing I did.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised.

Teaching was the hardest work I had ever done, and it remains the hardest work I have done to date.

Catholic schools in our Nation's education have been paramount in teaching the values that we as parents seek to instill in our children.

Some of the speakers we bring on campus may not reflect official church teaching, but that's how it is.

The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

Many students graduate from college and professional schools, including those of social work, nursing, medicine, teaching and law, with crushing debt burdens.

A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.

The five steps in teaching an employee new skills are preparation, explanation, showing, observation and supervision.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.