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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.
Ali Smith
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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
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More quotes by Ali Smith
To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
Ali Smith
It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.
Ali Smith
Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.
Ali Smith
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
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
Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
Ali Smith
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
I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
Ali Smith
The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.
Ali Smith
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
Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
Ali Smith
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
All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
Ali Smith
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
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
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
Ali Smith
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.
Ali Smith
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
There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
Ali Smith
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
