Bruce Weber

“The thing is, I think I like kids, more or less. I was an English teacher for a few years before I quit to enter publishing, and I enjoyed most of the work—the performing, the encouraging, the dispensing of door-opening revelations, even the wheedling and dickering you have to do with reluctant, sullen, grade-grubbing teens—but I was driven out of the classroom by the prospect of a life spent correcting papers. Maybe that reflects badly on me, makes me seem selfish or lacking in stick-to-itiveness or community spirit, or maybe it’s just evidence that I’d never have survived as a parent, with all the correcting and explaining that job entails. But believe me, you don’t even have to read sixty eighth-grade essays on To Kill a Mockingbird to suffer an unholy agony. Just carrying them around in your briefcase can bring you to tears from the anticipated tedium.”
― Bruce Weber, Life Is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist

“It shouldn’t be a surprise—and it pleases me no end—that Beckett was an avid cyclist. “The bicycle is a great good,” he once wrote. “But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.”
― Bruce Weber, Life Is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist