Lawrence Weschler Quotes

I have always been interested in people who live outside of the fabric of the norm.

I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.

Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom.

Sometimes, I'll hear from other writers or folks in the publishing industry that my books are rule-breakers, which I take as a compliment.

I think the world is a place for oddballs and freaks. I'm only interested in oddballs and freaks as characters.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.

It was actually the enormous risks I took with my pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance, that paid off so handsomely.

I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.

A lot of people told me that I'm committing musical suicide with my sound.

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you'll always have the pack. And you'll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

I'm not really interested in writing or reading about people who are nice and easy. I like the problem children.

I like to play people who are underdogs and misfits. People who are not on a straight and narrow path. That's exciting for me.

I like to take on the thing I don't like at the moment. I like to find something that looks wrong or feels off, something that I would never have done in the past, like brocade. And then all of a sudden, if we can make brocade work, then we've really done something, because I hate it. And that's just a reference. I don't actually hate brocade.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, 'Oh, that's the hook right there,' I'll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

I love stories about misfits and underdogs.

The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience.

I'm not always interested in Hollywood norms and boy-next-door kind of characters.

When you're a director, and you look at Scorsese's work, he's always challenging us to push the envelope and break the rules. Someone like that is necessary and a godsend.

I wake up every morning thinking I need to be edgier.

There will always be an underground.

I'm all about risque - I love that stuff. I love to be creative - that's what the entertainment business is about.

In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.

Even from the very beginning, the type of fans the Ramones generated were the kind of people who wound up running industry, who became professors and scientists. Our staunchest fans were always a little bit more on the outside, the type of people who didn't fit in with society.

The interesting thing about Laika is that it's very much an island of misfit toys. It's unusual people with strange talents and very unusual passions who have somehow found each other.