Latest Steve Almond Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I 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 Almond

  Men, Emotional, Thinking

  Source: www.popmatters.com

• Authors should be as involved with the marketing of their books as they want to be. No more, no less. I happen to recognized, quite early on, that no one was going to buy my book if I didn't do everything I could to let them know that the book existed.

  Steve Almond

  Book, Marketing

  Source: www.popmatters.com

• You'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 Almond

  Kids, People, Parent

  Source: www.popmatters.com

• 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 Almond

  Art, Cheer, Selfish

  Source: www.popmatters.com

• I 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 Almond

  Moving, Writing, Character

  Source: www.popmatters.com

• Americans 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 Almond

  Home, Mean, Car

  Source: www.popmatters.com

• I'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 Almond

  Writing, Long, Done

  Source: www.popmatters.com

• Much 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 Almond

  Book, Thinking, Love Story

  Source: www.popmatters.com

• I'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 Almond

  Action, Social Media, Audience

  Source: www.wbur.org

• People 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 Almond

  Expectations, People, Wonder

  Source: wbur.org

• If you want to fight a cult, you've got to form a cult.

  Steve Almond

  Fighting, Want, Form

  Source: therumpus.net

• A 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 Almond

  Football, Media, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

• Football is the most successful cult, in terms of members and profits, in human history. Oh wait, there's also religion.

  Steve Almond

  Football, Successful, Waiting

  Source: therumpus.net

• Football is Lotto for kids from economically vulnerable neighborhoods.

  Steve Almond

  Football, Kids, Vulnerable

  Source: therumpus.net

• Football 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 Almond

  Sports, Football, Kids

  Source: therumpus.net

• Part 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 Almond

  Football, Depressing, Boys

  Source: therumpus.net

• Just 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 Almond

  Football, Country, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

• Capitalism doesn't consider morality. It considers profitability.

  Steve Almond

  Morality, Capitalism, Profitability

  Source: therumpus.net

• Obama said, basically, "I wouldn't let any son of mine play football, though I do watch." And that struck me as remarkable! It's like he's saying, yeah, let some other set of parents or guardians put their boys up for that kind of punishment (and for my amusement). But not mine! It's just abject hypocrisy from a guy who should know better.

  Steve Almond

  Football, Son, Boys

  Source: therumpus.net

• Football 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 Almond

  Football, War, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

• There'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 Almond

  Football, Army, Men

  Source: therumpus.net

• Even 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 Almond

  Football, Men, Doors

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Steve Almond

  Sports, Truth Is, Has Beens

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Steve Almond

  Football, Hate, Hate Myself

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Steve Almond

  Sports, Crazy, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net