{"author":"Steve Almond","author_id":"Steve+Almond","total_quotes":18,"quotes":[{"text":"This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth.","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["desire","escapism","lust","youth"],"id":10637,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"},{"text":"Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["misery","misery-loves-company","music","soul"],"id":39888,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"},{"text":"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.","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["chocolate","food","people"],"id":105028,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"},{"text":"All language is an aspiration to music.","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["language","music","rock-and-roll"],"id":172685,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"},{"text":"The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song. It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called 'the happy accidents of language.","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["music"],"id":194496,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"},{"text":"There is no sin in the realm of taste.","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["music"],"id":209488,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"},{"text":"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 . . .","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["internet"],"id":221368,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"},{"text":"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.","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["revision","writing"],"id":226451,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"},{"text":"Narration, after all, isn’t just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["history","storytelling"],"id":244465,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"},{"text":"If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game . . .What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn’t to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by day.Finding the right balance of feedback—encouragement versus vigorous criticism—will help immeasurably.But your own commitment has to be to the process of improvement, not to the anticipated reward.If it’s any consolation, I’m still working on this final lesson.","author":"Steve Almond","tags":["writing-life"],"id":249692,"author_id":"Steve+Almond"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":18,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}