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" 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. "
Russell Smith
Imagine
Festival
Cross
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" Songs are great. I love songs. I sing them in the shower sometimes. They can be poignant or cheery or angry, and they can have catchy and satisfying melodies. There's nothing wrong with songs. "
Russell Smith
Great
Love
Sometimes
" 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. "
Russell Smith
World
Machines
Odd
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Everyone likes to hear that their eccentricities and their addictions are simply evidence of their sensitive artistic nature. "
Russell Smith
Sensitive
Everyone
Nature
" 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
" 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
" There is actually no such thing as an Artist type. 'Artist' is just an economic designation, a box you tick on a form. We are all people, and we are all creative. "
Russell Smith
Box
People
Just
" 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
" 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
" The only pleasurable part of taking the subway, as everyone will agree, is concocting elaborate fantasies about what it would be like to be married to the most interesting strangers you see there. "
Russell Smith
Interesting
You
Subway
" 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
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Shoes
Think
True
" The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well. "
Russell Smith
Who
Doing
Fine
" I would rather be nuts than unattractive. "
Russell Smith
Rather
Would
Than
" Frosh-week songs are meant to be offensive because offensive is rebellious. "
Russell Smith
Songs
Because
Offensive
" 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
" 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
" No surprise here: Pop music is by far the most conservative art form there is. "
Russell Smith
Music
Here
Art
" If you define eccentricity as creativity, then yes, creativity is eccentricity. "
Russell Smith
You
Yes
Then
" 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. "
Russell Smith
Best
World
People
" 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
" I'm in favour of hipster androgyny: Any trend that permits men to rebel against strict gender rules of appearance is going to make the world a more expressive and sensitive place for all of us. "
Russell Smith
Place
Men
Gender
" Kindle Worlds is a clever way to monetize a formerly underground trend, and to enable its participants to be remunerated. But it will be of no interest to writers with any literary ambition, as its constraints are designed to stymie even the most rudimentary impulses - even the first flickering of a dangerous originality. "
Russell Smith
Clever
Ambition
Dangerous
" The locale does not determine the dress code; the host does. "
Russell Smith
Dress
Does
Determine
" 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
" 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
" 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