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

Steve Almond

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Steve Almond
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: October 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
CA
Successful
Waiting
Profits
Term
Cult
Religion
Profit
History
Wait
Also
Terms
Human
Members
Humans
Football

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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.
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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.
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If you want to fight a cult, you've got to form a cult.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Football is Lotto for kids from economically vulnerable neighborhoods.
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I happen to love football so much and hate myself for loving it.
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All language is an aspiration to music.
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It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.
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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.
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We need books...because we are all, in the private kingdoms of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The truth is, every sport has been turned into a huge, nihilistic business.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most forms of rage, after all, are only sloppy cloaks for grief.
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