Most critics of gender division are women, and they're worried about girls and the roles presented for them by gendered entertainments. They are quite right to be. Telling girls that the cars and the guns are beyond their domain of expertise, and that they should content themselves with clothes and friendships, is limiting.

Periods of nostalgia are impossible to predict or explain.

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, different rules apply.

In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person.

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 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.

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.

Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.

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.

If you tell your husband or boyfriend for his whole life that he needn't worry about his clothes, that he couldn't possibly understand them, that they are a woman's affair, then you can hardly complain that he doesn't have any style sense. You all make this bed.

Universities can teach maturity. They can teach teenagers how to be adults, and that means to function outside a clique or a tribe.

I was given a thick paperback copy of the 'Guinness Book of Records' when I was 11 years old, and I read it gluttonously, cover to cover, paying special lip-smacking attention to all the incredibly gruesome chapters about the violence of human history.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the qualities essential to writing exciting stories, whether for page or screen, is an ability to abandon one's morality. We simply cannot be good writers and good people. One must be able to access one's darkest self, one's venality and pettiness and murderousness.

Most men are petrified of standing out in any way or being thought superficial.

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 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.