Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I would rather be nuts than unattractive.
Periods of nostalgia are impossible to predict or explain.
The locale does not determine the dress code; the host does.
The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.
Frosh-week songs are meant to be offensive because offensive is rebellious.
There is something insouciant and boyish about the sockless ankle in summer.
Unseasonal clothing actually only stands out when it's visibly uncomfortable.
No surprise here: Pop music is by far the most conservative art form there is.
Most men are petrified of standing out in any way or being thought superficial.
If you define eccentricity as creativity, then yes, creativity is eccentricity.
If people didn't read books on the subway, underground journeys would be dreary.
Ah, the intractable Canadian problem: Winter and finery are basically incompatible.
An Indian tribe is sovereign to the extent that the U.S. permits it to be sovereign.
I am so sick of being exhorted, as a writer, to improve the world by representing it in a more hopeful way.
What I don't understand is why men have decided that they like wearing hats indoors. It makes no sense to me.
We are still vulnerable to gender-targeted marketing no matter how carefully we edit our children's bookshelves.
What makes a publisher decide to market a book to a particular audience is not the subject matter but the style.
Canadian writers don't live in gated mansions; you can just talk to them when you see them lining up at the Second Cup.
Only a tiny portion of music history involves a singer and a lyric. Songs in music are generally thought to be a minor form.
Everyone likes to hear that their eccentricities and their addictions are simply evidence of their sensitive artistic nature.
Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.
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.
Universities can teach maturity. They can teach teenagers how to be adults, and that means to function outside a clique or a tribe.
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.
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.
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.
Fashion has always been in conflict with convention. Style involves some knowledge of both. But you can pretty much forget these seasonal injunctions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.