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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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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Never
Wouldn
Would
Writer
Trust
Gone
Running
Away
Woke
Anything
Dust
Even
Miles

More quotes by Ali Smith

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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.
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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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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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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Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
Ali Smith
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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.
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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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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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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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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Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
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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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.
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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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
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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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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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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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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