Russell Lynes Quotes

Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century.

Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

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.

Camouflage is a game we all like to play

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

It is always well to accept your own shortcomings with candor but to regard those of your friends with polite incredulity.

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.

Are you always this stupid or are you making a special effort today?

Tennis is an addiction that once it has truly hooked a man will not let him go.

Brains aren't everything. In fact in your case they're nothing.

Anybody who told you to be yourself simply couldn't have given you worse advice.

If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved.

Calling you an idiot would be an insult to all the stupid people.

Don't let you mind wander - it's far too small to be let out on its own.

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.

A lady is a woman who makes a man behave like a gentleman.

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.

Friends never make assumptions about you. They never expect a reason to go out with you. In fact friends only expect you to be you.

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.

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.

I'd agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong.

I don't know what makes you so dumb but it really works.

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

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

Hi there, I'm a human being! What are you?

The most effective comeback to an insult is silence.

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

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.

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

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

Your village just called. They're missing an idiot.

Sure, I'd love to help you out...now, which way did you come in?

Sure, I've seen people like you before - but I had to pay an admission.

If you took an IQ test, the results would be negative.

The world of the arts is by no means always comfortable, but neither is it likely ever to be boring. It is full of surprises, humor, traps for the unwary, and challenges to smugness. It is a world of moods as well as of revelation, of beliefs and fears, of unpleasant truth as well as of delicious fantasy. Perhaps it is arrogant to say that anyone who does not venture into this world is only half-interested in life. I say it, nonetheless.

I'd love to ask how old you are, but unfortunately I know you can't count that high.

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence. It is the dishonest businessman's substitute for conscience. It is the communicator's substitute, whether he is advertising man or editor or writer, for self-respect.

I'm sorry, I'm a little busy. Can i ignore you later?

Any real New Yorker is a you-name-it-we-have-it-snob whose heart brims with sympathy for the millions of unfortunates who through misfortune, misguidedness or pure stupidity live anywhere else in the world.

There are times when you just get down, you feel like nobody likes you. We're in high school forever. It's just what we do with it.

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

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

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

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!

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