Art & Creativity Quote by Steven Brust

Brust is doing something sly here: dressing a big, contentious claim about art in the casual language of taste. “Cool” sounds throwaway, like a shrug in a leather jacket, but it’s a knife. He’s stripping literature of its polite alibis (beauty, truth, moral uplift) and relocating it in the most human, least defensible place: what the writer can’t stop obsessing over. The line reads like permission for genre writers who’ve been told their passions are “mere entertainment,” and like a warning to anyone who thinks canon is an objective list rather than a long-running popularity contest with better lighting.

The subtext is about alignment. Brust suggests that reading isn’t a neutral act of decoding; it’s a negotiation of values. Every stylistic choice smuggles a worldview: what counts as bravery, what kind of humor is acceptable, whether sincerity is brave or embarrassing, whether violence is thrilling or tragic. When you “like” a book, you’re often recognizing your own instincts made articulate. When you don’t, it can feel less like disagreement with a plot than with a person.

Context matters: Brust comes out of speculative fiction, a field where “cool” is currency and aesthetics are openly tribal - swords, heists, baroque politics, hardboiled voice. He’s also puncturing the fantasy that craft alone guarantees admiration. Technical mastery can’t fully compensate for a reader who simply doesn’t share the author’s sense of what’s worth caring about. The provocation lands because it’s both cynical and oddly democratic: literature isn’t a temple; it’s a meeting place for compatible tastes.