Ali Smith Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it’s too late.

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.

The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.

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.

Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly; they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.

It’s about the connecting force from form to form. It’s the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It’s the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.

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