Ali Smith
Ali Smith
Ali Smith CBE FRSLis a Scottish writer...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionWriter
robins goodman
The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.
years knowing important
We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.
book argument proof
A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.
fashion gay fickle
Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
running dust gone
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.
bored want i-can
I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.
character past rolling-along
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.
simplicity phrases depth
Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.
thinking fiction pieces
[Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths.
block exercise growing-stronger
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.
mother father somewhere-else
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.
blessed good-friend two
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.
brother growing-up years
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.