Quote

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

Ali Smith

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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Form
Mortality
Stories
Total
Also
Faster
Connected
Tough
Short
Brevity
Joy
Consume
Story
Insightful

More quotes by Ali Smith

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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 of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.
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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.
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Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once
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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.
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There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
Ali Smith
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Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
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Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.
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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 of Oz.
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A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.
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I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
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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 once.
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To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
Ali Smith
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I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
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I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.
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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.
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The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.
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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
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Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
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[Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths.
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Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage.
Ali Smith