Ali Smith

“It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.”

“In the end, will truth matter? Of course truth will matter. Truth isn't relative. But there's going to be a great sacrifice on the way to getting truth to matter to us again, to finding out why it does, and God knows what shape that sacrifice will take.”

“Then I wondered why on earth would anyone ever stand in the world as if standing in the cornucopic middle of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but inside a tiny white-painted rectangle about the size of a single space in a car park, refusing to come out of it, and all around her or him the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting?”

“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.”

“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.”

“But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.”

“And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.”

“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.”

“The things in life which try to pin us down are the things we have to try to work against.”

“I'm quite good on the harmonica and can get a tune out of most musical instruments, so long as the tune is 'Oh Susannah.'”

“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 have a theory, now - that the whole of the Renaissance was peopled with girls dressed as boys so they could make art.”

“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.”

“But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.”

“I met an internationally esteemed writer at a literary party being given in her honor. She was wearing a beautiful pink, flouncy, frilly dress. I complimented her on it. She said, 'Ach, it's my nightgown. I couldn't decide what else to wear.'”

“Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.”

“Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.”

“Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?”

“Because, George thought as she sat there with her eyes closed back before Christmas in Mrs Rock's self-consciously comfortable chair in the counselling office, how can it be that there's an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert? How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?She didn't say it out loud, though, because there wasn't a point.It isn't about saying.It is about the hole which will form in the roof through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky.”

“Believe me. Everything is meant.”