RUSSELL LYNES

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.

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

When it gets dark enough you can see the stars.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

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

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