Words matter. These are the best Russell Smith Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Men over 60 often think that if they wear athletic shoes – soft-soled referee shoes or hiking shoes or actual running shoes – then they will look more youthful. The contrary is true.
No surprise here: Pop music is by far the most conservative art form there is.
The YA category is an entirely new one, and seems to have more to do with readability than with age group or theme. The adult YA readers I know do actually consistently say that they are looking for an easy read, a fun read, an unchallenging read.
If you define eccentricity as creativity, then yes, creativity is eccentricity.
Most men are petrified of standing out in any way or being thought superficial.
Ah, the intractable Canadian problem: Winter and finery are basically incompatible.
I would rather be nuts than unattractive.
I am so sick of being exhorted, as a writer, to improve the world by representing it in a more hopeful way.
What is a literary festival? Imagine a sort of cross between school and church. There are no actual festivities; what there are is a lot of public readings.
It’s great that I can look up a fact instantly on my cellphone, but I miss the days in my room with a dog-eared, text-heavy paperback, immersed in the statistics of crime and punishment and lunacy, completely alone with the narrative of human depravity.
In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it’s like to be a bad person.
From its beginning, fan fiction has been written mostly by women. Originally, this was because of a dearth of interesting female characters in conventional sci-fi.
Fashion has always been in conflict with convention. Style involves some knowledge of both. But you can pretty much forget these seasonal injunctions.
Sadly, I don’t really believe in the idea of timeless fashion. It’s an oxymoron. If ‘classic fashion’ really never changed, we’d all still be wearing togas.
I went to Queen’s – a fine university with the proudly stupidest frosh week in the country. This was, when I was there, supposed to be somehow evidence of a higher social class.
I don’t see my artist friends as any more neurotic or addiction-prone than the others. The roommates I have had who were into triathlons or environmentalism were just as crazy as the poets, just as prone to tears over gardening or air conditioners, just as ready to kite a cheque or binge on cookie dough.
Possibly the strangest book ever made, the ‘Codex Seraphinianus’ is an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, with illegible calligraphy – it is written in an alphabet no one can understand – and surreal drawings of odd beasts and machines.
Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.
Anything that encourages a boy to open a book, in a world of more violent and therefore more compelling video games, is something I’m going to pay for.
My son craves picture books about Transformers and Ninja Turtles and the Hulk; they show one fantastic creature smashing or zapping another into smithereens on page after page. They are dull and ugly and show no interesting stories or models of conflict resolution or character building.
A suit is just a suit: a practical garment, not a ceremonial robe; it can be worn out to dinner with friends or for a visit to an art gallery. Its beauty and craftsmanship are utterly wasted if you think of it as something magical and symbolic.
There is something insouciant and boyish about the sockless ankle in summer.
What I would love to see is art that explicitly addresses not personal intimacies but anonymous intimacies: the vast collections of facts about you and me that now exist in giant server banks.
Guys think that the military associations of camo are going to make them look tough, as if they might just break out a shotgun and take down a passing duck at any given moment. I’m not so sure.
The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers, and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.
The novel is just fine: It’s novelists who aren’t doing so well.
One of the qualities essential to writing exciting stories, whether for page or screen, is an ability to abandon one’s morality. We simply cannot be good writers and good people. One must be able to access one’s darkest self, one’s venality and pettiness and murderousness.
A song is a short composition for voice and instruments. It is a piece of sung poetry set to music. It is usually only a few minutes long.
Periods of nostalgia are impossible to predict or explain.
I have never, ever, not once, met a writer who said he or she would never read a mystery or a story set in some imagined future.
All coffee shops now have WiFi. Why bring a book when you could be wittily attacking some idiot columnist on Twitter, or responding to your date requests, or posting a picture of your foot? All of that is more gripping and immediate and social than books.
Conformism is essential to the group coherence and ‘spirit.’ The whole impetus behind tribalism of this kind is conservative: Belonging to the tribe is defined by opposition to other tribes. Our tribe, and its traditional ways, is superior to other tribes because it is ours.
I was given a thick paperback copy of the ‘Guinness Book of Records’ when I was 11 years old, and I read it gluttonously, cover to cover, paying special lip-smacking attention to all the incredibly gruesome chapters about the violence of human history.
