71 Quotes by Steve Almond

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.

I'm going to get hammered away for asking these questions. Fine. Hammer away. But don't pretend that's the same as answering.

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.

I remember he said, “if you had a dick you’d be dangerous." It’s the kind of comment that sticks with a woman

his dick, for example, was just that. It wasn’t odd or typical. It just was, by god. And isn’t that nice?

The Internet is what you make of it, obviously . . . But the Internet has also been a great aggregator of anxiety and an enabler of our worst tendencies. It has allowed us to trumpet our own opinions, to win attention by broadcasting our laziest and cruelest judgments, to grind axes in public. It has made us feel, in some perverse sense, that we are entitled to do so.

This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth.

In practice, the Internet functions more frequently as a hive of distraction, a simulated world through which most of us flit from one context to the next . . .

The body releases its electricity, merges with another, and together there is something like God in this pleasure. But afterward, in the quiet redolent air, there must also be offerings of truth. And so the mystery of love deepens.