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Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

Ali Smith

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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Happen
Makes
Art
Happens
Nothing
Something
Way

More quotes by Ali Smith

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There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
Ali Smith
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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.
Ali Smith
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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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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.
Ali Smith
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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
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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 style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.
Ali Smith
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Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
Ali Smith
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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.
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.
Ali Smith
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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
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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.
Ali Smith
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Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
Ali Smith
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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
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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
Ali Smith
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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.
Ali Smith
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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
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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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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
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It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.
Ali Smith
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All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
Ali Smith