Universities can teach maturity. They can teach teenagers how to be adults, and that means to function outside a clique or a tribe.
If you define eccentricity as creativity, then yes, creativity is eccentricity.
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.
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.
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...
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 am so sick of being exhorted, as a writer, to improve the world by representing it in a more hopeful way.
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, diffe...
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.
Frosh-week songs are meant to be offensive because offensive is rebellious.
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.
An Indian tribe is sovereign to the extent that the U.S. permits it to be sovereign.
The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.
Unseasonal clothing actually only stands out when it's visibly uncomfortable.
We are still vulnerable to gender-targeted marketing no matter how carefully we edit our children's bookshelves.
The locale does not determine the dress code; the host does.
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.
What makes a publisher decide to market a book to a particular audience is not the subject matter but the style.
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.
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.
