Quotes from Steve Almond

You take a stand because it's the right thing to do, not because it's effective. I

They were deployed not just to dodge a particular discussion, but to recast cynicism as a form of wisdom, and moral negligence as a form of martyrdom.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

20a. What You Should Be Writing About Anything you can't get rid of by other means.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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