Ali Smith

“I have the feeling that all stories travel with an understory.”

“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.”

“What are we doing in the world that we are denying people the right to an open education? And we are denying it by making education something you have to pay for so drastically. How are people supposed to afford this?”

“I'm happy to have nothing, so long as I'm sure I've been working.”

“My nature is feminist. How could you not be a feminist and be alive? The world is full of brilliant, interesting women.”

“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 probably find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened. And if we don't, we feel cheated.”

“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.”

“What I know most is that the difference between us is what makes us interesting and attractive and problematic and exciting and vital to each other. Give me difference over indifference any day.”

“It's so warm it's almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I've never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It's never sentimental. It's generous, but it's sardonic too. And whenever it's sardonic, a moment later it's generous again.”

“This isn’t fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.”

“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.”

“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 don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'”

“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.”

“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.”