I really believe that art has to play a role in changing the moral direction. Mean, selfish people are in charge of the government and we're letting them make us into a much meaner culture. It reminds me of McCarthyism, to be honest, and to the early stages of fascism. There are people out there cheering for war, treating those deaths like some kind of athletic event. How sick do we have to be that this is not only acceptable, but virtually unchallenged by other politicians or clergy or anyone? And it's artists who have to stand up and be counted. Right now.
Steve AlmondAt the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you've done and be proud of who you are.
Steve AlmondI don't really think of my narrator in terms of gender. I think of them much more in basic emotional terms. As an author, you either love yer peeps or you don't. There's no such thing as a "masculine voice" or a "feminine voice". Men and women think and speak and act in, like, a zillion different ways. Also, as a gross generalization: women tend to live closer to their feelings than men.
Steve AlmondPart of what depresses me so much about football is that it's so clearly about exploiting people, most of them poor boys of color, because of what they can do to entertain us, not because we have any genuine concern for them as people.
Steve AlmondYou've got all these parents who are projecting their pathologies of fear onto their kids and those kids are understandably messed up. Tragedies happen and that you have to allow kids to experience their own fear and guilt and sorrow. It's the cover-up that really screws people over. Unfortunately, America specializes in cover-ups.
Steve AlmondThe 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 AlmondThere's an invisible army of woman and men who really don't get why we give so much of ourselves to football. And they need to SPEAK UP.
Steve AlmondA lot of what I'm having to do to get myself weaned from football is really limit what media I allow myself to consume. And it's a big drag. But it's also the only way to kick the habit.
Steve AlmondIt 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 AlmondI 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 AlmondEven a hundred and fifty years ago, football was popular because it provided a manly spectacle that lots of men needed, after the industrial revolution. We went from a culture that lived out doors and expanded the frontier and fought the Indians to a bunch of guys in offices. So football provided this jolt, a kind of exalted cult of masculinity. And it still does that. Perhaps even more so today.
Steve AlmondOur 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 AlmondI've felt pressure to produce long fiction for as long as I've been writing fiction. There's just an incredible bias in the publishing industry toward novels and away from short stories. They're seen as D.O.A. in the marketplace, which seems nuts to me, given that various collections done smashingly and deservedly well in economic terms.
Steve AlmondFootball offers us a sanitized spectacle of combat that has a clear resolution, which we need more and more today given our incoherent overseas "wars."
Steve AlmondArt 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 AlmondTo 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 AlmondWhy 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 AlmondIt is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.
Steve AlmondWe need books...because we are all, in the private kingdoms of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend.
Steve AlmondBut 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 AlmondI want to view my own efforts to write a novel as a function of my own artistic aspirations rather than a good career move. And I need to learn how to commit to characters for a longer time, to confront the limits of my own capacities for attention and compassion. That's what a writing career does, in the best instance: it allows you to keep after what you can't do.
Steve AlmondJust imagine what would happen if Obama grew a pair and in his last year in office just said, "Forget it. Football is just too violent and too damaging to the economically vulnerable communities in this country. And it normalizes violence and fosters intolerance, etc." I mean: that would be awesome.
Steve AlmondBut 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 AlmondI'm going to proportion more time to organizing and taking action and less time to passively consuming news that is dispiriting me. Part of this will be to get off social media. I know social media is just a tool, but we've been using it in a way that has transformed us from a nation into an audience, passively spectating our own ruin.
Steve AlmondA 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 AlmondFootball is the kind of game where you have to really segregate kids from the general population and kind of colonize their minds. It's more intense and demands more than other sports. And this is why the folks who are involved (as players, coaches, boosters, fans) are so much more devoted to it. It's really a cult, when you think about it.
Steve AlmondEvery 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 AlmondI 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.
Steve AlmondFootball is the most successful cult, in terms of members and profits, in human history. Oh wait, there's also religion.
Steve AlmondAll 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 AlmondI 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 AlmondBut 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 AlmondWe 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 AlmondPeople in long-term, monogamous relationships are crushed by the expectation that a partner is going to provide everything they are looking for and wondering why they are dissatisfied when they have four of the ten boxes checked.
Steve AlmondMuch as I love stories, I think I'll only be satisfied with myself as a writer if I'm able to produce a novel that feels publishable. The books that truly take me away - for weeks at a time - are all novels.
Steve AlmondThere's something incredibly liberating about a holiday that encourages children to take candy from strangers
Steve AlmondAmericans seem to be living in a state of fear about the world, one that just keeps intensifying. I mean, look at our cars and homes. They've become these massive barricades. Look at what we watch on TV and in the movies - it's all a bunch of violent ideation. And all these TV shows about dead bodies.
Steve AlmondIt'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