I was strangely looking forward to writing about my DUI arrest, only because I've known for four years that I was gonna write about it somehow. I dunno that it was "fun" to write, just something I'd been aching to purge from my system.
Drew MagaryThe idea for me came when I was watching a 60 Minutes segment about resveratrol, the chemical in red wine that lets you live longer, supposedly. And they were like, "Who knows, maybe one day it will help to cure aging." And I thought, "Well, if they did that, we'd all kill each other." And then I laughed, and then I thought about how precisely that would happen. That's how the book came to be.
Drew MagaryYou need to be funny in a way that people feel like you're trying to make a deeper connection. So that's what I try to do.
Drew MagaryI know there's no heaven. I know it all turns to nothingness. But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void. Left conscious by some random fluke. Something that will scream out for this. That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting. For you. For the light. For anything.
Drew MagaryYou cannot hide from the world. It will find you. It always does. And now it has found me. My split second of immortality is over. All that's left now is the end, which is all any of us ever has.
Drew MagaryOnce ESPN leaves you, and you don't have a foothold anywhere else, you're done. It's very hard to do anything else, because in some ways, they're the only game in town.
Drew MagaryThank God there's somebody that doesn't like Stuart Scott. I'm so happy!. It was nice to have that counter-balance to ESPN.
Drew MagaryFor every hour a mother gets to herself, a father will demand five times that amount for drinking with friends and acting like an immature dipshit.
Drew MagaryI found that life for me gets a lot more serious as you get older. You start off young and happy and smiling and "Wooo! I'm having fun!" And then you get married, and that's very serious, and you have kids, and that's very, very serious. So as you get older, you start thinking about passing away, and that becomes extremely serious.
Drew MagaryI posted some story about the Arizona State baseball coach getting into a fight with an autograph hound, and it was a disastrous thing. The guy rescinded his story. It proved to me that I'm not cut out to be a proper journalist. I'm much better sitting around and making fun of journalists and telling them what terrible journalists they are than being an actual journalist.
Drew MagaryIf you have a great characters, you can always have your character do nothing or do something stupid, and people will still follow them, because they're so real and so tangible.
Drew MagaryI think I liked writing a novel better. Obviously, it's more rewarding. It's that marathon thing where it sucks when you're doing it, but you're proud of yourself at the end, and you've done it, and at the very least, nobody can take that away from you.
Drew MagaryI took time in the day to write as much of the book as I possibly could. I didn't write too much at night, because I don't like to - I'd rather watch TV.
Drew MagaryI don't know how a culture is going to evolve, but I think the way the Internet works now is, people go to the Internet to laugh and have a good time. That's why Tumblr feeds and I Can Has Cheezburger and memes get thrown into the blender with real news and sports news and politics and that stuff.
Drew MagaryI think it's the next thing, getting out of the comfort-zone readership, that at some point you have to try and break out of that and see if you can go in new directions. I wanted to do something that felt a lot bigger than a book that's going to sit on a toilet.
Drew MagaryOn the Internet, Spencer Hall at Everyday Should Be Saturday is the best writer in the universe. He's very funny. They're jokes about college football, but they come from somebody who's clearly smarter than the rest of us; it's always fun to get your jokes from someone who's a genius.
Drew MagaryYou become a parent, and your whole life becomes about worrying. You just worry constantly whether they'll be okay. And the idea that I'll be worried forever about them and what they do...I almost have a panic attack when I think about it. I'm worried, and I'm worried about having to worry so goddamn much.
Drew MagaryYou're going to have Yahoo! and places that don't have rights being much more aggressive in how sports news is covered.
Drew MagaryI'm always amazed by people like David Simon or the people at The Simpsons or J.K. Rowling who can create dozens and dozens of memorable characters. It seems so effortless, and even people who have just three lines in the shows or in the book have a very distinct personality, and you can feel the richness of their personal history.
Drew MagaryI wanted to write a book that maybe had the potential to go beyond the Deadspin and KSK [Kissing Suzy Kolber] readership.
Drew MagaryWhen you're 18, when you're at college, sports can be your life. You can watch every baseball game, every college basketball game, every football game. Once you have a family and kids, you can't do that anymore.
Drew MagaryYou always worry and you always fear what's next. But you eventually just push forward knowing you can't really do much about getting rid of the anxiety. You see people get pets after their kids leave the house because they're so used to having something around to dote on and worry about.
Drew MagaryI've always found that the best things I've ever written, or the things I like the most that I've written, are things where it's a pure idea, and you just follow it and put it down and see if it works.
Drew MagaryI occasionally get glimpses, but I have to reprioritize, because that's how it naturally progresses - things like family, responsibilities, and your job all take precedent.
Drew MagaryI know I still had to take money from my parents, because no one can afford to live in Manhattan, not even the rich people.
Drew MagaryMy job happens to be sports-related, so it's like my duty to watch football. It's my job. But that's not a change for me. When you're 18, it's life and death, because you don't have a kid, and it's a much bigger deal when you're 18. Having a kid - when the Vikings lost the 2009 NFC title game, it sucked, and I'm not happy about it, but my kid is still alive. You have to have that horrible forced perspective that you don't want.
Drew MagaryWhen a teacher is paying extra attention to your child, you believe that it's because you raised such an exceptional kid, one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest of her booger-eating friends.
Drew MagaryI've hated cockroaches my entire life.Tweeting jokes about it helps me cope, in a way. I'm not as jumpy killing cave crickets as I used to be. I still jump plenty though.
Drew Magary