Lawrence Weschler Quotes

United States, Author
February 13, 1952

A graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz (1974), Weschler was for over twenty years (1981–2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Awards—for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992—and was also a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award (1998).

I tend to write about people on the edge who are pushing things out from the edge but who are not necessarily big-ticket items.

Lawrence Weschler
- People
When you're a kid, your first five or six years, you converge all the time. School is about training that out of you, especially universities.

Lawrence Weschler
- Time
- School
- Training

I am able to write musically about the visual. I can pick up tones, I can pick up themes. And I find visual art is a wonderful launching-off place.

Lawrence Weschler
- Up
- Art
Genetically, I have tons of musical background in my life. My mother's father was a famous Weimar-era composer, Ernst Toch. My father's mother was the head of the Vienna Conservatory's piano department. It all canceled out in my case. I'm completely hopeless in music.

Lawrence Weschler
- Life
- Music
- Mother
I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.

Lawrence Weschler
- Life
- Writing
- Art