A Quote by Trevor Nunn
In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.
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I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.
I'm into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.
I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature.
I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.
I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.
By sixteen I thought, "Ah, this is all crap, you're all sheep, I'm not going to church, leave me alone." And then at a certain point in my teens I started to go to Catholic churches, by myself. Not because I wanted to be Catholic, but because I wanted to light a candle and say something like a prayer and just sit there. There was something I was missing or trying to reconnect with. But it was a secret at the time. I'd developed this cynical persona and the last thing I wanted to admit was that I was skulking around churches in my spare time.
What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens - I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature - using books themselves as a starting point.
Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.
I never thought I'd be a person who would want to write books...I promise you not a single English teacher I've ever had would have thought that this would be going on right now.
I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.
I picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don't get me wrong, I like reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause blindness, seizures and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who grades on the curve.
English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be.
For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.
I chose to be a maths teacher because I thought the marking would be easy. You'd just tick and cross, whereas if you're an English teacher, you've got to read essays. Then they said I had to analyse the methodology. It takes an eternity, it's insane!
I worked in the mechanical factories repairing cement trucks. The Cuban government wanted me to work in the university as a teacher in literature, but I declined because I wanted a more sense of the countryside.
My English teacher wanted to have sex with me in Junior High. The only problem was, my English teacher was a guy. I smacked him in his face with an eraser, chased him with a stapler and stapled his nuts to a stack of papers.
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