Steve Almond > Quotes

“Every now and then, I'll run into someone who claims not to like chocolate, and while we live in a country where everyone has the right to eat what they want, I want to say for the record that I don't trust these people, that I think something is wrong with them, and that they're probably - and this must be said - total duds in bed.”
― Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

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

“The answer is that we don't choose our freaks, they choose us.”
― Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

“It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.”
― Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories

“Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.”
― Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

“It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“My own kind. I'm not sure there's a name for us. I suspect we're born this way: our hearts screwed in tight, already a little broken. We hate sentimentality and yet we're deeply sentimental. Low-grade Romantics. Tough but susceptible. Afflicted by parking lots, empty courtyards, nostalgic pop music. When we cried for no reason as babies, just hauled off and wailed, our parents seemed to know, instinctively, that it wasn't diaper rash or colic. It was something deeper that they couldn't find a comfort for, though the good ones tried mightily, shaking rattles like maniacs and singing, "Happy Birthday" a little louder than called for. We weren't morose little kids. We could be really happy.”
― Steve Almond, Which Brings Me to You

“But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness.
At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.”
― Steve Almond

“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.”
― Steve Almond, Which Brings Me to You

“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.”
― Steve Almond

“But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was ten to fifteen pounds of candy, a riot of colored wrappers and hopeful fonts,snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTARTS, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipopsticks all akimbo, the foli ends of mini LifeSavers packs twinkling like dimes, and a thick sugary perfume rising up from the pillowcase.”
― Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

“Most forms of rage, after all, are only sloppy cloaks for grief.”
― Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

“This is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose. They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise. Every time I listen to "Sunday Bloody Sunday," for instance, I feel a pugnacious righteousness about the fate of the Irish people. I hear that thwacking military drumbeat and Bono starts wailing about the news he heard today and I'm basically ready to enlist in the IRA and stomp some British Protestant Imperialist Ass, hell yes, bring on the fucking bangers and mash and let's get this McJihad started.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It’s a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form.

Most of us will have to find our readers one by one, in other words, and against considerable resistance. If anything qualifies us as heroic, it’s that private perpetual struggle.

Put down the magazine, soldier. Forget about the other guy. Remember who you are.”
― Steve Almond

“The consensus was that I was an elitist, which is a right-wing term for someone smarter than you.”
― Steve Almond

“20a. What You Should Be Writing About

Anything you can't get rid of by other means.”
― Steve Almond, This Won't Take But a Minute, Honey

“The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song. It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called "the happy accidents of language.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“It is certainly true that cooking is therapeutic, creative and all those other faintly creepy self-helpish words. I would love to tell you that learning to cook was part of my journey toward actualization. I would love to tell Oprah this. I would love to tell Oprah this while weeping. But I learned to cook for a much simpler reason: in the abject hope that people would spend time with me if I put good things in their mouth. It is, in other words (like practically everything else I do), a function of my desperation for emotional connection and acclaim.”
― Steve Almond

“Vonnegut had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable.”
― Steve Almond

“Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less previous in the bargain. I don't want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it's just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn't going to give it the same attention he would if it cost him ten bucks. At what point does convenience become spiritual indolence? I realize this makes me sound like an old fart, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when the universe of recorded sound wasn't at our fingertips, when we had to hunt and wait and - horror of horrors - do without, when our longing for a particular record or song made it feel sacred.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“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.”
― Steve Almond

“Time is a track that loops back on itself, where memories rattle like tin trains. How had I been spending my days, but in the whirl of memories?”
― Steve Almond, Which Brings Me to You

“There is a point you reach, I mean, when you are just something bad that happened to someone else.”
― Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories

“What would happen if some invisible gas leak in the school cafeteria caused diminished brain activity in students? Can we safely assume district officials would evacuate the school until further notice? That parents would be up in arms? That media and lawyers would descend in droves to collect statements from the innocent victims? Can we assume that the community would not gather together en masse on Friday nights to eat hot dogs and watch the gas leak?”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“One of the reasons I hate Hollywood so much is that they portray the travails of teen life as so innocuous and fun loving, some kind of idyll before the mean business of adulthood. People forget how much it all hurts back then. Someone pinches you and you feel it in your bones. They don't want to face what a bunch of fragile sadists teenagers were. All these folks who acted all shocked and outraged when those kids in Columbine went off - where the hell did they go to high school?”
― Steve Almond, Which Brings Me to You

“What does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in America circa 2014 features giant muscled men, mostly African-American, engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood—run, leap, throw, tackle—into a corporatized form of simulated combat? That a collision sport has become the leading signifier of our institutions of higher learning, and the undisputed champ of our colossal Athletic Industrial Complex?”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“God was, to me, a lovely dream, a brave make-believe daddy who provided comforting answers to those who couldn't bear the prevailing evidence.”
― Steve Almond

“I suppose I was aware, in an abstract way, that there were men and women upon this earth who served in this capacity, as chocolate engineers. In the same way that I was aware that there are job titles out there such as bacon taster and sex surrogate, which is to say, job titles that made me want to weep over my own appointed lot in life.”
― Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

“By attempting to “write bad” for twenty minutes, they’d somehow managed to produce remarkable work.

From AWP - The Writer's Notebook”
― Steve Almond

“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.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us