“I didn’t think I could teach. So I thought I didn’t really want to be a teacher. I thought teaching was having a certain pedagogical intelligence which I didn’t thing I particularly possessed. It didn’t have any faith in myself for being able to teach. And also I though I wanted to live in the world. What I really liked about, say, the Beat poets as well as the New yorkSchool, two radically different sets of individuals, was that they lived in the world insofar as they went to a job every day. And I really like that. I wanted to just read what I wanted to read. I didn’t want it to fit into anything at that point. I wanted to wander off and read whatever I read, go whatever way I wanted to go. I guess in a way now I’ve done that enough so that I can teach different courses. ” — John Yau