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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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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
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More quotes by 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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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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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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We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.
Ali Smith
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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
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Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
Ali Smith
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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.
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
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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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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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There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
Ali Smith
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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
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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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Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
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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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
Ali Smith
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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.
Ali Smith
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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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The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.
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