Top 44 Ali Smith Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The things in life which try to pin us down are the things we have to try to work against.

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.’

A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I’d much rather go and read a book.

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.

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.

There’s a point at which we make our lives, but we also take the path which is given to us.

I’m happy to have nothing, so long as I’m sure I’ve been working.

I have a theory, now – that the whole of the Renaissance was peopled with girls dressed as boys so they could make art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that’s almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I’ve ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it’s important not to mix the two up.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.’

I don’t want a tombstone. You could carve on it ‘She never actually wanted a tombstone.’

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.

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.

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 really like jackets and tend to buy them to the detriment of my need of all the other items.

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.

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.’

Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.

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.

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.

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.

My nature is feminist. How could you not be a feminist and be alive? The world is full of brilliant, interesting women.