Ali Smith quotes

Ali Smith is a Scottish writer renowned for her inventive novels, short stories, and essays. Her work is known for its experimental narrative forms and deep engagement with social and political themes. She has received numerous literary awards and is celebrated for her unique voice in contemporary literature. Here are 31 of her quotes:

There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them. (Ali Smith)
Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late. View quote
Ali Smith
Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything. View quote
Ali Smith
To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better. View quote
Ali Smith
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen. View quote
Ali Smith
There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book. (Ali Smith)
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. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in. View quote
Ali Smith
Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay. View quote
Ali Smith
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. (Ali Smith)
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. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
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. View quote
Ali Smith
She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension. View quote
Ali Smith