Quotes from Ali Smith

Girl : do you hear me? cause although it seemed to be the end of the world to me - it wasn't. There was a lot more world : cause roads that look set to take you in one direction will sometimes twist back on themselves without ever seeming anything other than straight, ... many things get forgiven in the course of a life : nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right.

But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.

Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I'd never been inside a smile before. Who'd have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once

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

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

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.

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.

When we meet a work of art, there's something about that encounter that isn't fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens. The past and present exist in the same moment, and we know, as beings, that we are connected. All the people who lived before us, all who will come after us, are connected in this moment.

Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.

I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.

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.

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 want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.

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

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.'

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.

I'm quite good on the harmonica and can get a tune out of most musical instruments, so long as the tune is 'Oh Susannah.'