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 fo…

- 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.

- 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.

- Ali Smith

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

- Ali Smith

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.

- Ali Smith

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

- Ali Smith

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

- Ali Smith

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…

- Ali Smith

Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've f…

- Ali Smith