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Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

Ali Smith

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Ali Smith
Age: 63
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Art
Come
Comforted
Skinned

More quotes by Ali Smith

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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 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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It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.
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Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
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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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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.
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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
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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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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
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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.
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The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.
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Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
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There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
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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 above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.
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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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[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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I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
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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.
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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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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.
Ali Smith