Steve Almond Quotations

If I had been the kind of kid who kept a diary, the entries from the years 12 to say, 16, would have to read: Got high, ate candy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways.

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 that magazine, soldier. Forget about the other guy. Remember who you are.

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.