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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
Away
Woke
Anything
Dust
Even
Miles
Never
Wouldn
Would
Writer
Trust
Gone
Running

More quotes by 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.
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[Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths.
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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.
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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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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.
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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
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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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I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
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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.
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Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
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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.
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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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Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
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There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
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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.
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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
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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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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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Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
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