Ali Smith Quotes
-
What I know most is that the difference between us is what makes us interesting and attractive and problematic and exciting and vital to each other. Give me difference over indifference any day.
-
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.
-
Trees are great. Don't get me started about how clever they are, how oxygen-generous, how time-formed in inner cyclic circles, how they provide homes for myriad creatures, how - back when this country was covered in forests - the word for sky was an Old English word that meant 'tops of trees.'
-
I don't have a night stand. If I read at night in bed or too close to sleep-time, I lie awake thinking in the dark for hours.
-
I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
-
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.
-
A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.
-
Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
-
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.
-
Love and the imagination are connected.
-
If you can read the world as a construct, you can ask questions of the construct, and you can suggest ways to change the construct.
-
Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
-
I have the feeling that all stories travel with an understory.
-
I have a theory, now - that the whole of the Renaissance was peopled with girls dressed as boys so they could make art.
-
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.
-
What are we doing in the world that we are denying people the right to an open education? And we are denying it by making education something you have to pay for so drastically. How are people supposed to afford this?
-
There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
-
You never know what you're going to end up with when you sit down to write something. At the end, if it holds, it can do this multifarious thing - which is to open things rather than close them, to make them bigger rather than smaller, to cross those divides which we live every day of our lives.
-
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.
-
I'm quite good on the harmonica and can get a tune out of most musical instruments, so long as the tune is 'Oh Susannah.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
I met an internationally esteemed writer at a literary party being given in her honor. She was wearing a beautiful pink, flouncy, frilly dress. I complimented her on it. She said, 'Ach, it's my nightgown. I couldn't decide what else to wear.'
-
The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.