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" Everyone likes to hear that their eccentricities and their addictions are simply evidence of their sensitive artistic nature. "
Russell Smith
Sensitive
Everyone
Nature
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" Here is a fundamental conflict in educated society: We are not supposed to value beauty so highly, and yet who can defend against its sheer power to move, its rhetorical force? "
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" Only a tiny portion of music history involves a singer and a lyric. Songs in music are generally thought to be a minor form. "
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Thought
History
Music
" Wear your clothes with abandon, I say; don't keep them pristine as if for museums: They are meant to wear out. Then you get to buy new ones. "
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Museums
Clothes
You
" I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will not know the pleasures of the novel has been a staple of book reviewing since at least 1960. "
Russell Smith
Argument
Know
Television
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Son
Ugly
Character
" The locale does not determine the dress code; the host does. "
Russell Smith
Dress
Does
Determine
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Why
Abstract
Always
" What I don't understand is why men have decided that they like wearing hats indoors. It makes no sense to me. "
Russell Smith
Men
Me
Like
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Picture
Now
You
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Country
Evidence
Queen
" No surprise here: Pop music is by far the most conservative art form there is. "
Russell Smith
Music
Here
Art
" Ah, the intractable Canadian problem: Winter and finery are basically incompatible. "
Russell Smith
Problem
Winter
Incompatible
" I dislike turtlenecks at the best of times, as they are always unflattering to the imperfect male physique, but when worn in combination with a v-neck sweater, they say 'Grandpa' louder than any other item of clothing. "
Russell Smith
Always
Best
Sweater
" If you tell your husband or boyfriend for his whole life that he needn't worry about his clothes, that he couldn't possibly understand them, that they are a woman's affair, then you can hardly complain that he doesn't have any style sense. You all make this bed. "
Russell Smith
Worry
You
Husband
" We are still vulnerable to gender-targeted marketing no matter how carefully we edit our children's bookshelves. "
Russell Smith
Matter
Marketing
Still
" Personally, I see little distinction between an artistic mentality and criminality. You couldn't possibly create a compelling story without some wickedness or some fascination with the disgusting. Being good is a hindrance to a writer. "
Russell Smith
Create
You
Without
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Way
Makes
Book
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Short
Voice
Song
" Yes, the hunky barista looks even more terrifically masculine with three days' growth on his chin. Guys under 50 mostly do. But when your beard is partly or largely grey, that stubble can just look a little unwashed. Sadly, when you're over 50, different rules apply. "
Russell Smith
Rules
Look
Growth
" I would rather be nuts than unattractive. "
Russell Smith
Rather
Would
Than
" Indeed, the whole point of the man bun, I have surmised, is to assert a high proficiency at yoga. There are no yoga-achievement badges, no coloured belts like judo, so the male yoga expert needs some other kind of visible symbol. "
Russell Smith
Kind
Point
Like
" There is something insouciant and boyish about the sockless ankle in summer. "
Russell Smith
Ankle
About
Summer
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Great
Alone
Crime
" I am so sick of being exhorted, as a writer, to improve the world by representing it in a more hopeful way. "
Russell Smith
Way
I Am
Improve
" I am indeed completely nuts, but that doesn't mean I don't care about how I look. Sometimes, I admit, I will privilege appearance over comfort. "
Russell Smith
I Am
Comfort
Care
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Artist
Crazy
Friends
" My father was a graduate student at Oxford in the early 1960s, where the conventions and etiquette of clothing were crucial to the pervasive class consciousness of the place and time. "
Russell Smith
Place
Father
Early
" Most men are petrified of standing out in any way or being thought superficial. "
Russell Smith
Men
Most
Out
" Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism. "
Russell Smith
End
Beginning
Story
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Love
Art
Facts