Death is the only thing keeping us in line. by Drew Magary

Death is the only thing keeping us in line.

Drew Magary

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You need to be funny in a way that people feel like you're trying to make a deeper connection. So that's what I try to do.

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I know I still had to take money from my parents, because no one can afford to live in Manhattan, not even the rich people.

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My job happens to be sports-related, so it's like my duty to watch football. It's my job. But that's not a change for me. When you're 18, it's life and death, because you don't have a kid, and it's a much bigger deal when you're 18. Having a kid - when the Vikings lost the 2009 NFC title game, it sucked, and I'm not happy about it, but my kid is still alive. You have to have that horrible forced perspective that you don't want.

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I think it's the next thing, getting out of the comfort-zone readership, that at some point you have to try and break out of that and see if you can go in new directions. I wanted to do something that felt a lot bigger than a book that's going to sit on a toilet.

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I've hated cockroaches my entire life.Tweeting jokes about it helps me cope, in a way. I'm not as jumpy killing cave crickets as I used to be. I still jump plenty though.

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The idea for me came when I was watching a 60 Minutes segment about resveratrol, the chemical in red wine that lets you live longer, supposedly. And they were like, "Who knows, maybe one day it will help to cure aging." And I thought, "Well, if they did that, we'd all kill each other." And then I laughed, and then I thought about how precisely that would happen. That's how the book came to be.

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I posted some story about the Arizona State baseball coach getting into a fight with an autograph hound, and it was a disastrous thing. The guy rescinded his story. It proved to me that I'm not cut out to be a proper journalist. I'm much better sitting around and making fun of journalists and telling them what terrible journalists they are than being an actual journalist.

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If you have a great characters, you can always have your character do nothing or do something stupid, and people will still follow them, because they're so real and so tangible.

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I'm always amazed by people like David Simon or the people at The Simpsons or J.K. Rowling who can create dozens and dozens of memorable characters. It seems so effortless, and even people who have just three lines in the shows or in the book have a very distinct personality, and you can feel the richness of their personal history.

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When you're 18, when you're at college, sports can be your life. You can watch every baseball game, every college basketball game, every football game. Once you have a family and kids, you can't do that anymore.

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I occasionally get glimpses, but I have to reprioritize, because that's how it naturally progresses - things like family, responsibilities, and your job all take precedent.

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On the Internet, Spencer Hall at Everyday Should Be Saturday is the best writer in the universe. He's very funny. They're jokes about college football, but they come from somebody who's clearly smarter than the rest of us; it's always fun to get your jokes from someone who's a genius.

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