Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “We are human and vulnerable, whatever our individual situation: The moon looks on them all The Healers and the brilliant talkers The eccentrics and the silent walkers The dumpy and the tall.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

152. “Make sure that the road is always clear for your enemy to leave’?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

153. “There are so many people who would love to be able to live in peace, but there are so many others who do not want to let them. Mr.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

154. “We forget, she thought. We think that we were always the way we are now, but we were not. –.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

155. “The sharing of a book is a statement – a message of affection that is also an act of self-revelation. Join my club, it says. Come and sit beside me.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

156. “It is such an easy thing to do – to touch another in sympathy – but it is such a hard thing too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

158. “It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none. Some people would agonise over minor slips or mistakes on their part, while others would feel quite unmoved by their own gross acts of betrayal or dishonesty.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

159. “Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the pretentiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to recondite adjectives, whisky nosers spoke the language of everyday life, detecting hints of stale seaweed, or even diesel fuel.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

160. “I have three older sisters, so we were a reasonably large family and, in general, a happy one.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

162. “Not forgiving was like scratching at a sore to keep the healing scab from forming.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

163. “And that is why we must answer her hatred with love. I can’t say whether it will change her in her heart – it probably won’t. But if it makes her feel even just a little bit better about herself, she will be less envious.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

164. “She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry; the load of being ourselves.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

165. “Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

166. “Why? Why is there a crisis in literature? Because of lies and rottenness. Simplicity and sincerity have been replaced by obsfucation and pretense. Men, of course. They love to create mystery where none exists. It’s the way they think.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

167. “She had always believed that people who were nasty or unkind to others were only like that because there was something wrong in their lives, and that people who had something wrong in their lives were not to be despised or hated, but were to be pitied. So.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

168. “His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

169. “She looked down. He had clasped his hands together, his fingers interlaced. It was a gesture, she thought, of unequivocal pleasure – pleasure at hearing what all of us wanted to hear at least occasionally: that there was somebody who liked us, whatever our faults, and liked us sufficiently to say so.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

170. “It seems to me that we’re in danger of losing sight of certain basic civic values in society by allowing the growth of a whole generation of people who really have no sense of attachment to society.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

171. “I write four books a year. I’m very fortunate that I write quickly; around 3,500 words a day. Being strict about delineating my writing time and personal life, as well as keeping distractions at bay, is the only way I can accomplish this.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

172. “The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that’s how it should be.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

173. “She would give him the benefit of the doubt, as she always did: her experience had taught her that the names we gave to others, and the things we accused them of, often said more about us than they did about them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

174. “There are so many things we take in subconsciously and are unaware we ever saw. There is plenty of lumber like that in our minds.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

175. “Myth could be as sustaining as reality – sometimes even more so.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

177. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

178. “Everybody who consulted her was, in their way, hurting – even this rich man with his big Mercedes-Benz and his expensive cuff-links. Human hurt was like lightning; it did not choose its targets, but struck, with rough equality and little regard to position, achievement, or moral desert.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

179. “But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn’t it? – and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

180. “Places had echoes- and if one were sensitive, one might just pick up some resonance from the past, some feeling for what had happened.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

181. “We need to believe I think in justice. We need to run our lives as if justice existed. If we abandon a belief that justice will eventually be done, we make this world much more difficult for ourselves.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

182. “What does it matter, she thought, if businesses are left unattended, if people are not always as we want them to be; we need the time just to be human, to enjoy something like this: a boy chasing ants, a dry land drinking at last, birds in the the sky, a rainbow.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

183. “Everybody knows, she thought, that we have a skeleton underneath our skin; there’s no reason to show it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

184. “She had been tied to an incubus, the memory of a love that had been rejected and had had nowhere to go; she had been locked into a dead relationship and now the last dried skin of it had fallen away, like the scab on a wound, and she was free.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

185. “It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

186. “Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

187. “Make a list of what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’d like to know. Make a list of possible outcomes. Choose the outcome you think is best, then go for that!”

— Alexander McCall Smith

188. “Some people cannot bear news like that. They think they must live forever, and they cry and wail when they realise that their time is coming. I do not feel that, and I did not weep at that news which the doctor gave me. The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

189. “We’ve all had that sort of experience,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Every one of us, Mma. We’ve all had a first day at school, or a first day in a new job. We’ve all been unsure what to do.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

190. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

191. “Those important brain circuits, the ones that enabled most of us to avoid saying the wrong thing, were simply not there in Martha’s case; or fired in the wrong order; or were short-circuiting. In other words, Martha Drummond was an electrical problem. And understanding people as electrical problems undoubtedly helped one to tolerate them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

192. “If you take God out of it, then right and justice become small, human things. And weak things too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

193. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

194. “Crisis. It was a time of sustained anxiety for anybody who read a newspaper or listened to the news on the radio, and that included his mother, Mrs. Florence Woodhouse, who was anxious at the best of times and even more so at the worst. What was the point of continuing the human race when nuclear self-immolation seemed to be such a real and imminent possibility? That was the question that occurred to Florence as she was admitted to the delivery ward of a small country hospital in Norfolk.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

195. “Auden returns to one of his most important themes – that of repairing the tragic division in our lives, of making us whole again: While, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, So many long-forgotten objects Revealed by his undisclosed shining Are returned to us and made precious again; Games we thought we must drop as we grew up, Little noises we dared not laugh at, Faces we made when no one was looking. But he wishes us more than this.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

196. “There are so many ways of falling off the high moral ground you’ve carefully built up for yourself. Moral ground is like that – slippery at the edges.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

197. “When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

198. “For each of us, she thought, there is out completeness in another. Whether we find it, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding is a matter of moral luck.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

199. “Painters aren’t expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

200. “We are all human, she would say. Men particularly. You must not be ashamed.”

— Alexander McCall Smith