“I knew it long ago: I'm a compulsive teacher, but I can't teach. The godawful state of today's education system isn't what's stopping me. I lack at least two of the essential qualifications.
I cannot "suffer fools gladly." The smartest of my pupils would get all my attention, and the rest would have to fend for themselves. And I can't handle being interrupted.
Writing is the answer. Whatever I have to teach, my students will select themselves by buying the book. And nobody interrupts a printed page.”

On Certainty (1969)

On life in hiding from Nazi authorities, p. 48
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Context: One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking. I wouldn't say that I particularly matured. The thinking was physics thinking. I was just short of twenty-two then.
I was in hiding for two years and two months, something like that. In all that time I went out very, very little, just once in a great while, after dark. Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.

Quote from his letter to Jawlensky, early Februari 1935; as cited in 'The shape of the Future 3: Art' in Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson, Penguin 2012, p. unknown
Cage bought one of the small 'Head' paintings of Jawlensky, via his art-agent Galka E. Scheyer who showed Cage some paintings of Jawlensky early 1935, and sold his choice very cheap for 25 dollars; Cage was then 25 years old and strongly inspired by images, as he told Scheyer and wrote Jawlensky
1930s

Widely attributed to Shaw from the 1970s onward, but not known to exist in his published works. It is in keeping with some of his sardonic statements about the purposes and effectiveness of schools. First known attribution in print is in Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1971), "G. B. Shaw's line that the only time his education was interrupted was when he was in school captures the sense of this alienation."
Attributed

Booknotes interview (1994)

1990s, Ed Gordon interview (1994)

In the news

Source: The Name of the Wind

Mojo magazine (December 2009), p. 40.