Stefan Fatsis > Quotes

“(Excerpt from a standup routine by Matt Graham:)
Last Friday, my roommate sent me out to get some canned fish, because we're having some Catholic survivalists over for dinner. Weirdest thing happened. I'm coming up the steps, I stumble, all the groceries fall down the stairs. Except for a can of salmon, which falls up the stairs. Bizarre experience, but it gave me an idea. Couple nights later I was driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Cop pulled me over. I told him I was spawning. He said, 'Young man, I have reason to believe you're DUI. You know what that is?' I said, 'Do I!”
― Stefan Fatsis, Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players

“How you coach them is how they're going to play.”
― Stefan Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL

“Psychology of small things rules.”
― Stefan Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL

“Almost everything I've done is technically wrong, but Paul never mentioned the mistakes, only the corrective measures.”
― Stefan Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL

“Jason (Elam, a Christian) is the kid in high school who gets along equally well with the jocks, the brains, the geeks, and the slackers, and influences their behavior.”
― Stefan Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL

“Plimpton was a presence. He looked for ways in which he could make himself ridiculous. That made him a great storyteller.”
― Stefan Fatsis

“Dennis Baron discovered that the Mississippi state senate, citing “the exigencies of the times on account of woman’s new political freedom,” proposed three new legal pronouns in the state: hesh (“pronounced with a long e as in the word feet”), himer (“with the short sound of i on the first syllable”), and hiser (short i, the s pronounced z). The bill failed by one vote. The Sacramento Bee took action. “hir” will be the bee’s word for “he or she,” the newspaper’s editorial page declared.”
― Stefan Fatsis, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary

“Shanahan (the head coach) doesn't allow failure to take root.”
― Stefan Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL

“The biggest threat to lexicography wasn’t a rogue AI dictionary or even the fear that the remaining publishers would replace their harmless drudges with scary chatbots. It was the reality that John Morse had identified when I started this project: that expertise was ceasing to matter, that institutions were growing suspect, that quality was becoming elastic. The chatbot revolution was just the latest manifestation, in lexicography as in life. “People are happy with good enough,” Grant Barrett said. “And AI-based definitions are good enough.”
― Stefan Fatsis, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary