Russell Smith Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

If people didn't read books on the subway, underground journeys would be dreary.

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.

Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.

Frosh-week songs are meant to be offensive because offensive is rebellious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Universities can teach maturity. They can teach teenagers how to be adults, and that means to function outside a clique or a tribe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most critics of gender division are women, and they're worried about girls and the roles presented for them by gendered entertainments. They are quite right to be. Telling girls that the cars and the guns are beyond their domain of expertise, and that they should content themselves with clothes and friendships, is limiting.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Periods of nostalgia are impossible to predict or explain.

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.

There is something insouciant and boyish about the sockless ankle in summer.

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?

Everyone likes to hear that their eccentricities and their addictions are simply evidence of their sensitive artistic nature.

Fashion has always been in conflict with convention. Style involves some knowledge of both. But you can pretty much forget these seasonal injunctions.

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.

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.

It used to be that you could get a lot of recognition by writing about Canada, as long as it was about small towns and nature.'
'Really?'
'Yeah. You could have canoes and the prairies or, also, sad women, very sad women who were fat or whose husbands had left them or something. There was a lady who wrote about fucking a bear, which was like a union with the land. There was a lady who wrote about mystical experiences she had at a cottage in northern Ontario. I was never sure what that was about. They were very important at one time, very stern and important. I had to study them in school. Anyway, he was one of them. He concentrated on the prairies, with a lot of native names, and wise native people, like there's a young boy with an Ojibway grandmother who will teach him the ways of the forest, sort of thing, and there's a lot of history, like a lot of the Riel rebellion for example.'
'The what?'
'History. And there's a lot of disaster, on the prairies, like people having to rebuild their sod houses after floods and so on.'
They drove on the humming highway for a while.
Then Nicola said, 'So you haven't answered my question.'
'What question?'
'Do you think he's any good?'
'Oh. The thing is... it's not, it doesn't matter. It's important. So it doesn't matter if I think it's good or not.'
'Okay. So it doesn't matter. So I'm asking you. What you think. Do. You. Think. It's. Good.' She slapped her bare thigh.
James paused for a

Ah, the intractable Canadian problem: Winter and finery are basically incompatible.

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.

I would rather be nuts than unattractive.

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.

No surprise here: Pop music is by far the most conservative art form there is.

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.

Canadian writers don't live in gated mansions; you can just talk to them when you see them lining up at the Second Cup.

The locale does not determine the dress code; the host does.

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.

Unseasonal clothing actually only stands out when it's visibly uncomfortable.

Most men are petrified of standing out in any way or being thought superficial.

Only a tiny portion of music history involves a singer and a lyric. Songs in music are generally thought to be a minor form.

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.

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.

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.

We are still vulnerable to gender-targeted marketing no matter how carefully we edit our children's bookshelves.

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.