Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert B. Parker

Self-deprecation is Parker's stealth weapon here, and it lands with the timing of a good detective punchline: quick, dry, and revealing. By calling "teaching" "too strong a word" for his time at Northeastern, he refuses the sanctimony that can cling to academia. The joke is that he's not really joking. Parker is signaling a discomfort with institutional authority, even as he benefited from it and helped sustain it.

The intent feels twofold. First, it's an act of image management from a writer whose brand is competence without pomp. Parker wrote Spenser novels full of men who see through posturing; this line performs that same ethic in real life. Second, it's a small act of cultural boundary-policing. "Teaching" carries moral weight: mentorship, formation, a kind of high calling. Parker swaps it for something humbler and more transactional, as if to say he merely showed up, did the job, and went back to the real work: writing.

The subtext is a quiet critique of how universities mythologize themselves and their labor. The classroom is often framed as transformative; Parker frames it as contingent, messy, maybe even performative. Coming from a novelist rather than a career academic, it's also a wink at impostor syndrome: the sense that storytelling doesn't neatly translate into syllabus-and-seminar legitimacy.

Context matters: Parker taught early on, before the bestseller machine fully took over. The line reads like retrospective triage, pruning his biography to keep the persona intact. He won't let the title do the boasting for him.