Quote

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

Ali Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Histories
Stories
Important
Even
Things

More quotes by Ali Smith

Image
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 rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.
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
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
Image
Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
Ali Smith
Image
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
Image
There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
Ali Smith
Image
remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.
Ali Smith
Image
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 bored.
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
As for Aliki - if you were to stand in the middle of Rome and say the name Sophia Loren, or Paris and say the name Catherine Deneuve or Brigitte Bardot, or L.A. and the name Marilyn Monroe, it's like standing in Athens, or anywhere in wide-flung Greece, and saying Aliki Vougiouklaki. A huge star - and so little known elsewhere in the world.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Image
Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
Ali Smith
Image
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
Image
A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.
Ali Smith
Image
I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
Ali Smith