292 Quotes by Ali Smith

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we’ll find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened.

Maybe coincidence never means the way you want it to. Because if it did it wouldn’t be coincidence, would it?

I want to be bored. But I can’t. But I really don’t want to be this thing that I’m having to be instead of being bored.

Well, the naivety and the vitriol were always there all along, Iris says. The internet’s just made them both more visible. That’s maybe a good thing.

But fiction has the unique power of revealing something true.

It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue. It is the end of dialogue.

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.

I don’t know, her mother says. I don’t know much about it. It was quite hard to find out anything. But I’m finding it quite enjoyable, not knowing.

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.