Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ali Smith
Age: 63
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Reading
Read
Understand
Music
Tend
Book
Piece
Believe
Expect
Never
Listen
Pieces

More quotes by 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
Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
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
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
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
There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
Ali Smith
Image
Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.
Ali Smith
Image
All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
Ali Smith
Image
To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
Ali Smith
Image
The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.
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
Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
Ali Smith
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
Ali Smith
Image
Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
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
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