Quotes from 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.

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.

And after that, I watched our house collapse in on itself and I spent some time lying in the rubble. Then I vanished completely. I wasn't here at all. Then you phoned.

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.

It's the word 'artful'; it's such a great word, with its dark and its light side, its art and its cunning, the craft and the crafty of it - I've been preoccupied with the word 'artful' and the twin notions of 'cornucopia' and 'pickpocket' it suggests for quite some time.

The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.

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.

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.

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.

The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it - the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.

What's the point of art, of any art, if it doesn't let us see with a little bit of objectivity where we are?

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.

I see the difficulty of kids in going to university, the difficulty of kids in schools getting arts education, so that the arts and drama and the creative arts are extracurricular. They aren't: they are at the centre, and they are the equipment we so desperately need in the world.

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.

I grew up completely alone but with all the comforts of knowing I had a cushioning family structure around me - and yet I could free myself from it.

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

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

I don't have a night stand. If I read at night in bed or too close to sleep-time, I lie awake thinking in the dark for hours.

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.