Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

Everybody has friends they dislike; people who they have slipped into relationships with, people they would not have chosen had they been more cautious, more circumspect.

The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.

Most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

It is not enough just to identify a problem; there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.

I am easily persuaded to continue to have fun.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.

It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

At night we are all strangers, even to ourselves.

There is plenty of work for love to do.

We all know that it is women who take the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.

I am capable of being idle.

As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don't think they look to me for political guidance.

Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.

I'm interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.

The Okavango Delta is an astonishing sight: the great Okavango River, rather than flow towards the sea, flows inland, into the sands of the Kalahari.

The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.

If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

Writers obviously have to bear witness to the harsh face of the age.

I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

It would be wonderful to have a guru; it would be like having a social worker or a personal trainer, not that people who had either of these necessarily appreciated the advice they received.

We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.

As a writer I've learned certain lessons. One of them is to be careful about how you put a view, and to bear in mind how easily and readily you'll be misinterpreted.

I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!

Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.

Edinburgh used to be a haughty city.

Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realize how widespread envy was.

A wedding was a strange ceremony, she thought, with all those formal words, those solemn vows made by one to another; whereas the real question that should be put to the two people involved was a very simple one. Are you happy with each other? was the only question that should be asked; to which they both should reply, preferably in unison, Yes.

It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.

Reality television, which turned its eye on people who were doing nothing but being themselves, was the perfect expression of this trend [of narcissism]. Let's look at ourselves, it said. Aren't we fascinating?

We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.

I think that we've made great moral progress in the second half of the 20th century in many respects, and particularly in relation to human rights but I think that we are losing sight of some of the values of concern for others, and self-respect and respect for others.

She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.

Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.

One of the most destructive things that's happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together - which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

It is the search for beauty...That is what it is. We find ourselves on this earth--gods and men--and we know that it is beautiful. That is one of the few things we understand--beauty; because it is there, in the world, and we can see it all about us. We want beauty. It requires our love. It just does.

To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

Ritual is a terribly important, binding cement in a society. If we abandon formality and rituals, we're actually weakening the relationships that exist between people that bind.

New York is a wonderful place to be up, an awful place to be down.

We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.

Simple questions--and simple answers--were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.