Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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 Simplicity and sincerity have been replaced by obsfucation and pretense.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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

159. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry,” he said.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

185. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

192. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

199. “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

200. “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