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" 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
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" Have you noticed the people most likely to be up in arms about governments apparently spying on us tend to be the most non-private people you know? The people launching petitions and wailing about Big Brother and data collection are most likely to be the most constant self-presenters. "
Russell Smith
Brother
People
You
" Only a tiny portion of music history involves a singer and a lyric. Songs in music are generally thought to be a minor form. "
Russell Smith
Thought
History
Music
" Ah, the intractable Canadian problem: Winter and finery are basically incompatible. "
Russell Smith
Problem
Winter
Incompatible
" There is something insouciant and boyish about the sockless ankle in summer. "
Russell Smith
Ankle
About
Summer
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Writing
Self
Good
" Universities can teach maturity. They can teach teenagers how to be adults, and that means to function outside a clique or a tribe. "
Russell Smith
How
Tribe
Teach
" 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
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Fashion
Believe
Classic
" Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real. "
Russell Smith
Detail
I Am
Surface
" Even in early adulthood, men can't be told what to wear; they can only be subtly moved by example, encouragement, and a generally sophisticated atmosphere. "
Russell Smith
Men
Adulthood
Encouragement
" 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
" 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. "
Russell Smith
World
Book
Boy
" 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
" Increasingly, to dismiss any popular artistic style is seen as the worst kind of snobbery. And snobbery, it goes without saying, is unacceptable in a diverse and democratic world. "
Russell Smith
Style
Kind
Saying
" The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well. "
Russell Smith
Who
Doing
Fine
" 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. "
Russell Smith
History
Book
Attention
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Friends
You
Beauty
" 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
" No matter how fine your suit and your shoes, you will remind everyone that you are not yet a grownup man by wearing them with your old college knapsack, in its nasty, nylon glory. "
Russell Smith
College
Man
You
" 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
" 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. "
Russell Smith
She
Story
Said
" Periods of nostalgia are impossible to predict or explain. "
Russell Smith
Predict
Nostalgia
Impossible
" Everyone likes to hear that their eccentricities and their addictions are simply evidence of their sensitive artistic nature. "
Russell Smith
Sensitive
Everyone
Nature
" 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? "
Russell Smith
Beauty
Value
Society
" We are still vulnerable to gender-targeted marketing no matter how carefully we edit our children's bookshelves. "
Russell Smith
Matter
Marketing
Still
" If you define eccentricity as creativity, then yes, creativity is eccentricity. "
Russell Smith
You
Yes
Then
" If people didn't read books on the subway, underground journeys would be dreary. "
Russell Smith
Underground
People
Books
" 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
" 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
" 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