Ali Smith Quotes
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The things in life which try to pin us down are the things we have to try to work against.
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Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is: it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together.
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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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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.'
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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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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.
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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.
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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
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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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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 see the difficulty of kids in going to university, the difficulty of kids in schools getting arts education, so that the arts and drama and the creative arts are extracurricular. They aren't: they are at the centre, and they are the equipment we so desperately need in the world.
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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 don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
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I have a theory, now - that the whole of the Renaissance was peopled with girls dressed as boys so they could make art.
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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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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?
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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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There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
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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.
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Love and the imagination are connected.
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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.
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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.
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In the end, will truth matter? Of course truth will matter. Truth isn't relative. But there's going to be a great sacrifice on the way to getting truth to matter to us again, to finding out why it does, and God knows what shape that sacrifice will take.
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I have the feeling that all stories travel with an understory.