Scottish - Writer | 1962 -
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.
Ali Smith
LifeSmileGoodTrainingI AmBaby
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.
GreatTimeArtLightDarkCraft
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.'
WorkManThinkFeelTryRust
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.
JoyToughStoryShortYouKnow
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.
TimePastThoughtsEndSearchSpeed
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.'
GreatSkyMeTreesBackCountry
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.
LieNightThinkingStandDarkBed
If you can read the world as a construct, you can ask questions of the construct, and you can suggest ways to change the construct.
ChangeWorldQuestionsYouAskRead
Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is: it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together.
ArtTogetherImaginationWorldHuman
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?
ArtSeePointLittleWhereUs
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.
HeartYouBackWayParagraphWord
I have the feeling that all stories travel with an understory.
TravelFeelingStories
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