Steve Almond Quotes

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

We need books...because we are all, in the private kingdoms of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend.

Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.

Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.

At the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you've done and be proud of who you are.

I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways.

At about the age of ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound.

The answer is that we don't choose our freaks, they choose us.

If you want to fight a cult, you've got to form a cult.

The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines - and I want to stress this - is because I refused to give up. Period.

All language is an aspiration to music.

To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

A lot of what I'm having to do to get myself weaned from football is really limit what media I allow myself to consume. And it's a big drag. But it's also the only way to kick the habit.

It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.

I love men, the restlessness of their corrupted souls, the way they hide their heavy, murderous hearts, their sudden delicacies and small shocking acts of tenderness.

There's something incredibly liberating about a holiday that encourages children to take candy from strangers

Football is Lotto for kids from economically vulnerable neighborhoods.

I happen to love football so much and hate myself for loving it.

Football offers us a sanitized spectacle of combat that has a clear resolution, which we need more and more today given our incoherent overseas "wars."

Capitalism doesn't consider morality. It considers profitability.

I do think, as crazy as it sounds, that sports is an addiction and that it should be accorded some of the same supports as any other addiction.

Most forms of rage, after all, are only sloppy cloaks for grief.

There's an invisible army of woman and men who really don't get why we give so much of ourselves to football. And they need to SPEAK UP.

The truth is, every sport has been turned into a huge, nihilistic business.

Football is the most successful cult, in terms of members and profits, in human history. Oh wait, there's also religion.

In practice, the Internet functions more frequently as a hive of distraction, a simulated world through which most of us flit from one context to the next . . .

This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smokey mouth.

There is a point you reach, I mean, when you are just something bad that happened to someone else.

This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth.

There is no sin in the realm of taste.