Quote

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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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Year
Tears
Games
Baby
Stead
Firsts
Laughing
Burst
Play
Told
Sisters
First
Game
Consists
Years
Stand
Smile
Good
Alive
Laugh
Life
Called
Training

More quotes by Ali Smith

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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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It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.
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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.
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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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
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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
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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I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
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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Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once
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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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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Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
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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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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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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
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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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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
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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
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Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
Ali Smith