Top 40 Steve Almond Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Steve Almond

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

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

— Steve Almond

3. “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.”

— Steve Almond

Featured in: Life Is Short Quotes

4. “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.”

— Steve Almond

5. “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.”

— Steve Almond

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

— Steve Almond

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

— Steve Almond

8. “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.”

— Steve Almond

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

— Steve Almond

10. “The answer is that we don’t choose our freaks, they choose us.”

— Steve Almond

11. “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.”

— Steve Almond

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

— Steve Almond

13. “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.”

— Steve Almond

14. “There’s something incredibly liberating about a holiday that encourages children to take candy from strangers.”

— Steve Almond

15. “I myself despise “Macarena,” and yet I have been humming it for the past three days and my two-year-old daughter is now humming it and I’m pretty sure she will never stop.”

— Steve Almond

16. “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.”

— Steve Almond

17. “All language is an aspiration to music.”

— Steve Almond

18. “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.”

— Steve Almond

19. “Boyle looked like a Monty Python in drag. Then she opened her mouth and this epic noise came ripping out of her. Within a week, she was the most celebrated person on earth, an.”

— Steve Almond

20. “At what point do we admit that the NFL’s true economic function is to channel our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed?”

— Steve Almond

21. “The record is not simply a storage device. Its value resides in the particular set of memories and emotional associations held by its owner. These are inseparable from the physical object, which is no longer a physical object but an article of faith.”

— Steve Almond

22. “It’s the reason we become enamored of certain singers, I think, because they project the voice we wish to summon within ourselves. His.”

— Steve Almond

23. “The reason Americans favor milk chocolate over dark is because Milton Hershey got his bars into enough American mouths to establish our collective taste.”

— Steve Almond

24. “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.”

— Steve Almond

25. “Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less precious in the bargain. I.”

— Steve Almond

26. “One of the reasons I hate Hollywood so much is that they portray the travails of teen life as so innocuous and fun loving, some kind of idyll before the mean business of adulthood. People forget how much it all hurts back then. Someone pinches you and you feel it in your bones. They don’t want to face what a bunch of fragile sadists teenagers were. All these folks who acted all shocked and outraged when those kids in Columbine went off – where the hell did they go to high school?”

— Steve Almond

27. “Rock and roll allowed people to lie about themselves, and to be sanctified for the extravagance of their fictions. This.”

— Steve Almond

28. “Isn’t there something you want to tell me, something filthy and lovely and true.”

— Steve Almond

29. “Hey, Dad, check this out!” Ike stared at the boy. He clearly wanted to be down there watching his kid possibly crack his skull open, rather than recording a song about how frightened he was that his kids might crack their skulls open.”

— Steve Almond

30. “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.”

— Steve Almond

Featured in: Romance Quotes

31. “What would happen if some invisible gas leak in the school cafeteria caused diminished brain activity in students? Can we safely assume district officials would evacuate the school until further notice? That parents would be up in arms? That media and lawyers would descend in droves to collect statements from the innocent victims? Can we assume that the community would not gather together en masse on Friday nights to eat hot dogs and watch the gas leak?”

— Steve Almond

32. “There is a point you reach, I mean, when you are just something bad that happened to someone else.”

— Steve Almond

Featured in: Romance Quotes

33. “We live in a society that puts a high premium on success and I learned, mainly through my dad, that salvation would come through success, and I carried that into my adult life and it’s a total lie.”

— Steve Almond

34. “The true work of love resides in sticking with the process, especially in those moments, and eras, when desire is forced to coexist with doubt.”

— Steve Almond

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

— Steve Almond

36. “Styx has become the mullet of bands.”

— Steve Almond

37. “If you’re wondering if you’re a collector, ask yourself two questions. Do I own too many records? Do my friends and family feel I own too many records? If your respective answers are No and Yes, you’re a Collector.”

— Steve Almond

38. “More than any single issue, Gil’s essential topic was America, how the nation had fallen away from its moral precepts and into ruin, a condition of spiritual malaise that would eventually deliver us the bigotry and psychotic greed of the Bush Era.”

— Steve Almond

39. “First, that troubled people tend to be the most powerful figures in a family, the most effective at exporting their internal discord into the world around them.”

— Steve Almond

40. “Convenience is the gateway drug to entitlement. It drains people of their empathy, because it fosters the illusion that they can proceed through life without hardship. This makes it harder for them to imagine others who are facing hardship.”

— Steve Almond