Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “When there is nothing you can do to stop the march of adverse events, then the best thing, she felt, was to get on with life and not to worry.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

153. “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

154. “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

155. “Saying sorry does not make you look small – it makes you look big.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

156. “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

157. “Every small wrong, every minor act of cruelty, every act of petty bullying was symbolic of a greater wrong. And if we ignored these small things, then did it not blunt our outrage over the larger wrongs?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

158. “That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

159. “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

160. “But you cannot expect every writer to dwell on human suffering. I think my books do deal with grave issues. People who say they are too positive probably havent read them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

161. “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

162. “We should all busy ourselves in being who we are, although many of us do not and spend so much time and energy being something else. We try to be what others want us to be, or what we ourselves want to be. And then we suddenly realise that our lives have shot past and we have not got round to being who we really.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

163. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

165. “I am easily persuaded to continue to have fun.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

166. “The husband should say to the reverend: ‘And I promise not to defy my wife.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

167. “You are a lucky lady to be marrying a man who can fix things. Most husbands just break things.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

169. “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

170. “Words that are full of hurt sometimes need to be left in the air where they have been spoken.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

171. “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

172. “I would certainly never consider myself a Renaissance Man; I’m not fit to look at the dust from the chariot wheels of many of those who have gone before me.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

173. “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

174. “She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that’s what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

175. “You do not have to read a book to understand how the world works. You just have to keep your eyes open.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

176. “A flaky skin was particularly bad if you were a criminal, she had read, as it meant that you left a great deal of DNA at the scene of the crime. That had amused her. That would teach any flaky-skinned housebreakers to burgle people’s houses. “You really need to do something about your skin,” the police might say to such people when they arrested them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

177. “And the problem was that there was a positive epidemic of narcissism, encouraged by commercial manipulation and by the shallow values of Hollywood films. And interestingly enough, the real growth area was male narcissism.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

178. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

185. “Well,” said Mma Ramotswe, “I have felt that anger. I felt it when I saw that the van had gone. I felt it a bit in the truck on the way back. But what is the point of anger now, Mma? I don’t think that anger will help us.” Mma Makutsi sighed. “You are right about anger,” she said. “There is no point in it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

186. “Truth had a way of coming out on top – and it was just as well for everybody that it did. If there ever came a day when truth was so soundly defeated that it never emerged, but sank, instead, under the sheer volume of untruth that the world produced, then that would be a sad day for Botswana, and for the people who lived in Botswana. It would be a sad day for the whole world, that day.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

187. “She had a great respect for books herself, and she wished that she had read more. One could never read enough. Never.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

188. “He said: What is patriotism but love of the food one ate as a child?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

189. “Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

190. “By the time Domenica arrived at the Gothic Revival sandstone building on Queen Street, she had put out of her mind all thought of Antonia’s torrid affair – at least she assumed it was torrid, and anyway, she wondered if there was any point in having an affair which was not torrid.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

191. “If you want to write, do two things – read lots of books and also, in your own writing, practise. Just write and write and then write again. persist. And never be put off or discouraged. You can do it!”

— Alexander McCall Smith

192. “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

193. “People don’t talk about mercy very much these days – it has a rather old-fashioned ring to it. but it exists and its power is quite extraordinary.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

194. “Sometimes she thought that the people overseas had no room in their heart for Africa, because nobody had ever told them that African people were just the same as they were.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

195. “We can be confident in our dealings with the world when what the world sees is the outer person, with all the outer person’s defences: the intimacy of a love affair is a different matter altogether. And who might not feel just the slightest bit insecure under the gaze of a lover – a gaze which falls on birthmarks, on blemishes physical and psychological, on our imperfections and impatience, on our human vulnerability?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

196. “I do not think this is so, because there is no difference between white men and black men; we are all the same; we are just people.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

197. “Rich people are just people,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I have not met a rich person yet who isn’t just the same as us. Being happy or unhappy has nothing to do with being rich.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

198. “I am often thanked by people for inventing the term traditionally built. The people who give me thanks for this are often traditionally built themselves.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

199. “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

200. “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