Ali Smith Quotes Quotes

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.
A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
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.'
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.'
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.
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.
I have a theory, now - that the whole of the Renaissance was peopled with girls dressed as boys so they could make art.
I have the feeling that all stories travel with an understory.
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.'
I really like jackets and tend to buy them to the detriment of my need of all the other items.
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.
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.
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Ali Smith
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