Quotes from Steve Almond

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

The true work of love resides in sticking with the process, especially in those moments, and eras, when desire is forced to coexist with doubt.

All language is an aspiration to music.

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.

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?

Isn't there something you want to tell me, something filthy and lovely and true

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

Convenience is the gateway drug to entitlement. It drains people of their empathy, because it fosters the illusion that they can proceed through life without hardship. This makes it harder for them to imagine others who are facing hardship.

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.

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.

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

First, that troubled people tend to be the most powerful figures in a family, the most effective at exporting their internal discord into the world around them.

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

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.

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.

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.

I remember he said, "if you had a dick you'd be dangerous." It's the kind of comment that sticks with a woman

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.