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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.

Ali Smith

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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Rather
Read
Book
Much
Good
Always
Dialogue
Life
Proof
Like
Argument

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.
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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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I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
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I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
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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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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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There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know 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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Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
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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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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.
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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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The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don’t need.
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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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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.
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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.
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Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
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Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
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