Bissinger Quotes

#1. Committing unnecessary surgeries is very, very rare. And it's very wrong.

H. G. Bissinger

#2. I always had a curiosity about Texas. I had a curiosity about small-town life, although, granted, Odessa's not a tiny town.

H. G. Bissinger

#3. Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

H. G. Bissinger

#4. I'm really not interested in other people's opinions, because I think frankly most of those opinions are either misinformed and adding to this endless ball of hot air we have in our society where everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and sacred and what counts.

H. G. Bissinger

#5. I actually like football a great deal.

H. G. Bissinger

#6. In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

H. G. Bissinger

#7. I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.

H. G. Bissinger

#8. My grandmother got her law degree from Syracuse University in roughly 1911 and later co-founded with her husband an investment banking firm on Wall Street known as Lebenthal & Co.

H. G. Bissinger

#9. It was stupid not to let MacArthur finish off those rice eaters. Push 'em back.

H. G. Bissinger

#10. Maybe it's a tired tale, but without an education, you're not going to go anywhere.

H. G. Bissinger

#11. One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic.

H. G. Bissinger

#12. One of the exciting things about reporting is going to places you've never been to before.

H. G. Bissinger

#13. There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits.

H. G. Bissinger

#14. But I would much prefer students going to college to learn and be prepared for the rigors of the new economic order, rather than dumping fees on them to subsidize football programs that, far from enhancing the academic mission instead make a mockery of it.

H. G. Bissinger

#15. saw religion in Odessa used not to reinforce religious beliefs at all but as an excuse for people to come together and be made comfortable with their own social beliefs in racial and gender bigotry.

H. G. Bissinger

#16. Actually, my dog I think is the only person who consistently loves me all the time.

H. G. Bissinger

#17. I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover, which came out weekly, unusual for a high school paper. Then my first day at Penn I went right to the 'Daily Pennsylvanian' and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page.

H. G. Bissinger

#18. If someone is going to criticize what you've written and you believe in what you've written then you should respond.

H. G. Bissinger

#19. I am 5'6' and desperately wish I was taller.

H. G. Bissinger

#20. I think the older you are, the more you're going to cling to the printed word as being sacred.

H. G. Bissinger

#21. Permian had established itself as perhaps the most successful football dynasty in the country - pro, college, or high school. Few brands of sport were more competitive than Class AAAAA Texas high school football, the division for the biggest schools in the state.

H. G. Bissinger

#22. Nothing could be sillier than we got good people here. We got the same cross-section of assholes as anywhere.

H. G. Bissinger

#23. Your perception plays tricks when you are hoping for something.

Buzz Bissinger

#24. Because Cards' fans are the most knowledgeable and loyal in all of baseball, they booed almost reluctantly, polite as booing goes, what would have passes as a standing ovation in Philly.

H. G. Bissinger

#25. I'm gonna party, see how intoxicated I can get and how many rules I can flaunt. That's my motto.

H. G. Bissinger

#26. He saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but he also saw an inevitable danger in adults' living vicariously through their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more quickly than that of the high school athlete.

H. G. Bissinger

#27. This must not be planet earth," Cone told his partner. "This must be hell." But it wasn't. It was just Odessa.

H. G. Bissinger

#28. Why did I become a writer? Because I grew up in New York City, and there were seven newspapers in New York City, and my family was an inveterate reader of newspapers and I loved holding a paper in my hand. It was something sacred.

H. G. Bissinger

#29. Odessa is the setting for this book, but it could be anyplace in this vast land where, on a Friday night, a set of spindly stadium lights rises to the heavens to so powerfully, and so briefly, ignite the darkness.

H. G. Bissinger

#30. Athletics: it's a wonderful thing, it's a spell-binding thing, nothing in life has quite as much pageantry, as much emotion within a finite time frame, it's incredibly exciting.

H. G. Bissinger

#31. I don't have many friends in Philadelphia. I sort of have one. I have the dog and someone else.

H. G. Bissinger

#32. Think about your jobs. Where do you want to be in five years?" asked Fowler of a female student. "Rich," the student replied. "How are you going to achieve that?" "Marry someone.

H. G. Bissinger

#33. If you leave your wife and you don't ever contact her again, that says something about how you felt about the marriage.

H. G. Bissinger

#34. If the season could ever have any salvation, if it could ever make sense again, it would have to come tonight under a flood of stars on the flatiron plains, before thousands of fans who had once anointed him the chosen son but now mostly thought of him as just another nigger.

H. G. Bissinger

#35. Teams are made up of a lot of components. They're made up of hunger, they're made up of desire, they're made up of chemistry, and they're made up of emotion.

H. G. Bissinger

#36. She said also that they absolutely hated any assignment in which they had to interpret what they had read. If they had to think about anything, make critical judgments and deliberations, the cause was hopeless. The best they could be expected to do was regurgitate.

H. G. Bissinger

#37. I think the only safe medium are books, because people like to hold books in their hand.

H. G. Bissinger

#38. I am the father of twin sons that were born in Philadelphia at Pennsylvania Hospital in 1983. They were 13 weeks premature. Gerry weighed 1 pound 14 ounces, and Zachary 1 pound 11 ounces. They were the first male twins to ever survive at Pennsylvania Hospital.

H. G. Bissinger