Art & Creativity Quote by A. Bartlett Giamatti

Teaching is framed here not as a benevolent hobby but as a creative compulsion, a kind of disciplined hunger. Giamatti’s choice of “believe” is doing quiet work: it admits the self-mythology teachers often carry, the necessary conviction that what they offer matters enough to justify the grind. “Gift for giving” has a faintly ironic edge too. Gifts can flatter the giver as much as they serve the receiver; they can be refused; they can create obligation. By naming it a “gift,” he hints at the emotional economy of the classroom, where authority is often softened into generosity.

The engine of the quote is the word “drive,” repeated and intensified as “irrepressible.” That insistence yanks teaching out of the sentimental lane and into the same psychological category as art-making and entrepreneurship: not a job, an internal pressure seeking form. He refuses to distinguish “a work of art” from “a market” or “a building,” collapsing the usual hierarchy of noble and practical creation. The subtext is provocative: teaching is infrastructure. It’s world-building. It shapes how people think the way a city shapes how people move.

Context matters: Giamatti was an educator and later a public-facing steward of institutions, attuned to how society undervalues the labor it depends on. This line reads like a defense of vocation against a culture that treats education as service work. He’s not romanticizing teachers; he’s legitimizing their ambition. The best teachers, he implies, aren’t driven by sweetness. They’re driven by making something that lasts: minds, standards, a public.