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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.

Ali Smith

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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Nothing
Except
Going
Exercise
Surpassing
Way
Wants
Harmful
Never
Either
Blocks
Growing
Censorship
Almost
Stops
Literature
Block
Everything
Stronger

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All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
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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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Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
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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.
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remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.
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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
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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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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.
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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 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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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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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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