- Feeling
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- Nov 07, 2020
Ali Smith Quotes
Most Famous Ali Smith Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Difference
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Better
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- Nov 07, 2020
I had a job, I got ill, I left the job to get better, and while I was getting better, I wrote some stories. I sent them to some publishers and the fifth one who replied said they'd take them. Then they went bankrupt. Then that bankrupt publisher got bought by a bigger firm. Story: in the end is the beginning, and in the beginning is the end.
- Nov 07, 2020
I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Footage
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- Nov 07, 2020
How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Family
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- Nov 07, 2020
I was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by myself, playing games by myself.
- Fashion
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- Nov 07, 2020
Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020
A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
- Father
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
It's the word 'artful'; it's such a great word, with its dark and its light side, its art and its cunning, the craft and the crafty of it - I've been preoccupied with the word 'artful' and the twin notions of 'cornucopia' and 'pickpocket' it suggests for quite some time.
- Man
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Past
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Imagination
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- Nov 07, 2020
Love and the imagination are connected.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- Lie
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Questions
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Imagination
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Little
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- Nov 07, 2020
What's the point of art, of any art, if it doesn't let us see with a little bit of objectivity where we are?
- Heart
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- Nov 07, 2020
The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it - the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.
- Existence
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- Nov 07, 2020
People tend to see modernism as the opposite of a celebration. They see it as a fracturing and an art built round an absence, but it's really a celebration of our existence.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
When you fall in love with a book, something especially interesting and exciting is happening because of the way language works on us as human beings. And I love language.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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?
- Education
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Dressed
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have a theory, now - that the whole of the Renaissance was peopled with girls dressed as boys so they could make art.
- Moment
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- Nov 07, 2020
When we meet a work of art, there's something about that encounter that isn't fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens. The past and present exist in the same moment, and we know, as beings, that we are connected. All the people who lived before us, all who will come after us, are connected in this moment.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
The things in life which try to pin us down are the things we have to try to work against.
- Live
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Our
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- Nov 07, 2020
There's a point at which we make our lives, but we also take the path which is given to us.
- Family
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- Nov 07, 2020
I grew up completely alone but with all the comforts of knowing I had a cushioning family structure around me - and yet I could free myself from it.
- Jackets
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- Nov 07, 2020
I really like jackets and tend to buy them to the detriment of my need of all the other items.
- Being
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- Long
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- Nov 07, 2020