Russell Lynes Quotes - Page 2

Clutter is what happens to things when they become useless but friendly.

The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon.

The most effective comeback to an insult is silence.

Shouldn't you have a license for being that ugly?

The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.

The Good Quality Snob, or wearer of muted tweeds, cut almost exactly the same from year to year, often with a hat of the same material, [is] native to the Boston North Shore, the Chicago North Shore, the North Shore of Long Island, to Westchester County, the Philadelphia Main Line and the Peninsula area of San Francisco.

Wasting time is negative, but there is something positive about idleness.

Camouflage is a game we all like to play

A truly appreciative child will break, lose, spoil, or fondle to death any really successful gift within a matter of minutes.

In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste.

For all its flexibility, television is more a mirror of taste than a shaper of it.

The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century.

There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating; accumulators act at random. The Collyer brothers, who died among the tons of newspapers and trash with which they filled every cubic foot of their house so that they could scarcely move, were a classic example of accumulators, but there are many of us whose houses are filled with all manner of things that we "can't bear to throw away.

And I thought I had problems? Look at your face!

What we are headed for is a sort of social structure in which the highbrows are the elite, the middlebrows are the bourgeoisie and the lowbrows are hoi polloi.

The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there.

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art.