Quote

There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.

Ali Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Things
Hard

More quotes by Ali Smith

Image
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 wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.
Ali Smith
Image
I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
Ali Smith
Image
All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.
Ali Smith
Image
There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
Ali Smith
Image
Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
Ali Smith
Image
Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.
Ali Smith
Image
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 sent them to some publishers and the fifth one who replied said they'd take them. Then they went bankrupt. Then that bankrupt publisher got bought by a bigger firm. Story: in the end is the beginning, and in the beginning is the end.
Ali Smith
Image
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
Ali Smith
Image
The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don’t need.
Ali Smith
Image
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 myself, playing games by myself.
Ali Smith
Image
All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
Ali Smith
Image
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 of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training will stand me in good stead all through my life.
Ali Smith
Image
Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.
Ali Smith
Image
Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
Ali Smith
Image
I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
Ali Smith
Image
Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
Ali Smith
Image
I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.
Ali Smith
Image
Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
Ali Smith
Image
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 writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it's important not to mix the two up.
Ali Smith
Image
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 - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.
Ali Smith