Steve Almond Quotations

The craziest Peep-related candy I've ever gotten is a chocolate egg with a Peep inside it. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make that, which strikes me as both beautiful and pathetic.

I was saddled with this strange name, which meant that I was constantly, constantly, being serenaded with the Sometimes you feel like a nut Almond Joy/Mounds jingle.

It isn't the flavor of coconut that troubles me, but the texture I feel as if I'm chewing on a sweetened cuticle.

Nothing on Earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.

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.

The first half of the twentieth century was Boston's freak zenith. The city was home to 140 candy companies by 1950, with sales of $200 million per year. The beginning of the end for Boston came with the rise of the national candy conglomerates: Hershey's and Mars.

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.

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

Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.

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.

Art 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.

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

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

It 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.

All language is an aspiration to music.

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.

Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.

We 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.

A 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.

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.

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.

At the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you've done and be proud of who you are.

Something is funny, most of all, because it's true, and because the velocity of insight into this truth exceeds our normal standards. Something is funny because it's outside our accepted boundary of decorum. Something is funny because it defies our expectations. Something is funny because it offers a temporary reprieve from the hardship of seeing the world as it actually is. Something is funny because it is able to suggest gently that even the worst of our circumstances and sins is subject to eventual mercy.

All 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.

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