Ali Smith Quotes

47 quotes in 797 categories

• I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard…
• We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just…
• A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists…
• As for Aliki - if you were to stand in the middle of Rome and say the name Sophia Loren, or Paris and say the…
• But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And…
• I had a job, I got ill, I left the job to get better, and while I was getting better, I wrote some stories. I…
• I was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by…
• I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every…
• My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father…
• Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way…
• We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept…
• You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, 'I'm a writer,' it would be gone. You…
• I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being…
• And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high…
• Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
• There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
• We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it…
• The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.
• Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
• There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.

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