Steve Almond Quotes & Sayings

They do the essential work of literary art: they make us more human than we were before. (from the Introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed) — Steve Almond

A good teacher, after all, wields the authority of a parent with none of the psychological baggage. The best of them are semi-mysterious figures whose wisdom seems boundless and whose approval helps us discover who we are. — Steve Almond

it was off to the library, where people went before God invented the Internet and — Steve Almond

The record is not simply a storage device. Its value resides in the particular set of memories and emotional associations held by its owner. These are inseparable from the physical object, which is no longer a physical object but an article of faith. — Steve Almond

We are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn't embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and all that we have to offer, in the end, is love. — Steve Almond

If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game ...
What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn't to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by day.
Finding the right balance of feedback - encouragement versus vigorous criticism - will help immeasurably.
But your own commitment has to be to the process of improvement, not to the anticipated reward.
If it's any consolation, I'm still working on this final lesson. — 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

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

Why are people so fascinated by how to eat Valomilks?' She said, 'Well, Dad, they're round and they're messy. But that's what makes them fun. Once we get older we're not supposed to be messy anymore. But for one moment when you're eating a Valomilk, it's okay to be messy again. — Steve Almond

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

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

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

By attempting to "write bad" for twenty minutes, they'd somehow managed to produce remarkable work.
From AWP - The Writer's Notebook — Steve Almond

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

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

We don't choose our freaks, they choose us ... We may not understand why we freak on a particular food or band or sports team. We may have no conscious control over out allegiances, But they arise from our most scared fears and desires and, as such, they represent the truest expression of ourselves. — Steve Almond

More than any single issue, Gil's essential topic was America, how the nation had fallen away from its moral precepts and into ruin, a condition of spiritual malaise that would eventually deliver us the bigotry and psychotic greed of the Bush Era. — Steve Almond

The body releases its electricity, merges with another, and together there is something like God in this pleasure. But afterward, in the quiet redolent air, there must also be offerings of truth. And so the mystery of love deepens. — Steve Almond

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

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

... writing is about developing the capacity to expose yourself on the page, if not your life story at the very least your prevailing anxieties and the people who caused them. — Steve Almond

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

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. — Steve Almond

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

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

Rock and roll allowed people to lie about themselves, and to be sanctified for the extravagance of their fictions. This — Steve Almond

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

It's the reason we become enamored of certain singers, I think, because they project the voice we wish to summon within ourselves. His — Steve Almond

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

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

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

Eventually, I headed to the bathroom, and I mention this only because I saw in that bathroom the most quintessentially American artifact I have ever encountered: a bright blue rubber mat resting in the bottom of the urinal emblazoned with the following legend:
Epply
World's Cleanest Airport
Omaha, NE
God bless our relentless idiotic optimism. — Steve Almond

Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage. — Steve Almond

Narration, after all, isn't just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder. — Steve Almond

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

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

The reason Americans favor milk chocolate over dark is because Milton Hershey got his bars into enough American mouths to establish our collective taste. — Steve Almond

Styx has become the mullet of bands. — Steve Almond

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. — Steve Almond

The Internet is what you make of it, obviously ... But the Internet has also been a great aggregator of anxiety and an enabler of our worst tendencies. It has allowed us to trumpet our own opinions, to win attention by broadcasting our laziest and cruelest judgments, to grind axes in public. It has made us feel, in some perverse sense, that we are entitled to do so. — Steve Almond

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

Boyle looked like a Monty Python in drag. Then she opened her mouth and this epic noise came ripping out of her. Within a week, she was the most celebrated person on earth, an — Steve Almond

At what point do we admit that the NFL's true economic function is to channel our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed? — Steve Almond

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

I myself despise "Macarena," and yet I have been humming it for the past three days and my two-year-old daughter is now humming it and I'm pretty sure she will never stop. — Steve Almond

Three years ago, researchers at Purdue University began monitoring every hit sustained by two high school teams. The goal was to study the effect of concussions. But when researchers administered cognitive tests to players who had never been concussed, hoping to set up a control group, they discovered that these teens showed diminished brain function as well. As the season wore on, their cognitive abilities plummeted. In some cases, brain activity in the frontal lobes - the region responsible for reasoning - nearly disappeared by season's end. "You have the classic stereotype of the dumb jock and I think the real issue is that's not how they start out," explained Thomas Talavage, one of the professors of the study. "We actually create that individual. — 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

All language is an aspiration to music. — Steve Almond

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

If you're wondering if you're a collector, ask yourself two questions. Do I own too many records? Do my friends and family feel I own too many records? If your respective answers are No and Yes, you're a Collector. — Steve Almond

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

We live in a society that puts a high premium on success and I learned, mainly through my dad, that salvation would come through success, and I carried that into my adult life and it's a total lie. — Steve Almond

Hey, Dad, check this out!" Ike stared at the boy. He clearly wanted to be down there watching his kid possibly crack his skull open, rather than recording a song about how frightened he was that his kids might crack their skulls open. — Steve Almond

This, of course, is the big dance of capitalism: how to keep morality from gumming up the gears of profit, how to convince people to make bad decisions without seeing them as bad. — Steve Almond

Something is funny, most of all, because it's true, and because the velocity of insight into this truth exceeds our normal standards. Something is funny because it's outside our accepted boundary of decorum. Something is funny because it defies our expectations. Something is funny because it offers a temporary reprieve from the hardship of seeing the world as it actually is. Something is funny because it is able to suggest gently that even the worst of our circumstances and sins is subject to eventual mercy. — Steve Almond

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

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

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

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

20a. What You Should Be Writing About

Anything you can't get rid of by other means. — Steve Almond

Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It's our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don't read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn't some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. — 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

When people bitch about the death of the vinyl LP as a medium (and lord knows they bitch) what they're mostly lamenting is the death of this kind of listening. Music as a concerted sonic experience, rather than the backing track to a flashing screen. What — Steve Almond

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 ... — Steve Almond

music came before anything else, before language and large-scale war and liquid soap, and because music is the one giant thing America has done right, amid all it has done wrong. Music, that ancient and incorruptible bitch. — 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

Retail chains charge tens of thousands of dollars to place a particular candy bar in the racks near the register. Very few people, after all, head into — Steve Almond

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

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

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

But here's a little secret, between you, me, and the rest of the mall: buying shit isn't enough. What we wish for in our secret hearts is self-expression, the chance to reveal ourselves and to be loved for this revelation, devoured by love. And thus, most of us go about our duties of commerce and leisure in a state of perpetual longing, with nocturnal excursions into the province of despair. — Steve Almond

But I come to stories in the naked hope they will fuck me up. — Steve Almond

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

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. — Steve Almond