Literary Birthday – 24 August – Ali Smith

Happy Birthday, Ali Smith, born 24 August 1962.

10 Quotes

1. Great books are adaptable. They alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives.
2. Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst, and living to your full. They mean everything.
3. 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.
4. A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I’d much rather go and read a book.
5. Words are like untying a corset – you can move into this great space with them.
6. 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.
7. Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship.
8. To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
9. There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in everything, everywhere we look.
10. And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.

Ali Smith is a Scottish writer. She is best known for her three major collections of short stories Free Love and Other Stories, Other Stories and Other Stories and The First Person. Her latest novel is Autumn.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AliSmith2011.png

TimDuncan, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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