Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Writers just play out their fantasies in their books. They are often very unstable, tricky people, Bertie. Writers are usually very bad at real life and feel that they have to create imaginary lives to make up for it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

202. “Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

203. “Most theories and ideologies claimed to explain the world, or some aspect of it, but did not in any real sense influence the world. Underneath everything, beneath the layers of explanation that we created, beneath all our elaborate protocols, people still did exactly as they wanted to do. In other words, you did not change human nature by inventing a theory of human nature.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

204. “When Emma was five, Mrs. Woodhouse died. Emma did not remember her mother. She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

205. “French philosophers had been able to admire Mao and his works because they did not have to live in China at the time.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

206. “She was tuned in to a different station from most people and the tuning dial was broken.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

207. “Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down – or up, I suppose – replacing other people in the process.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

208. “She watched him take the trumpet from its case and fit the mouthpiece. She watched as he raised it to his lips and then, so suddenly, from that tiny cup of metal against his flesh, the sound would burst out like a glorious, brilliant knife dividing the air. And the little room would reverberate and the flies, jolted out of their torpor, would buzz round and round as if riding the swirling notes.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

209. “As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

210. “You have to leave your heart to get on with it. It’s rather like breathing. We don’t have to remind ourselves to breathe.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

212. “I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything he says after twelve o’clock at night or after a glass or two of anything.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

213. “There are many sadnesses in the hearts of men who are far away from their countries.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

214. “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

215. “We were, when all was said and done, children lost in the wood, and to break into tears was the most understandable of reactions, the most quintessentially human one too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

216. “That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “If you punish somebody harshly, she said, then you are simply inflicting more pain on the world. You are also punishing not only that person, but his family and the people who love him. You are punishing yourself, really, because we are all brothers and sisters in this world, whether we know it or not; we are all citizens of the same village.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

230. “We are all sent the dreams we yearn for, she thought; no matter how unhappy or fraught our waking world may be, we are sent dreams in which we can do the things the heart really wants us to do.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

231. “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

232. “No matter what precautions were taken, socks disappeared into a Bermuda Triangle for socks, a swirling vortex that swallowed one sock at a time, leaving its partner stranded.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

233. “There are many more kind people than not-so-kind people,” said Mma Ramotswe.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

234. “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

235. “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

236. “The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

237. “And he thought for a moment how stupid our society had become, that its nanny-like concern for risk should prevent one man helping another to take a dead friend up the steps.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

238. “The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind – one which enjoyed dry with and understood the absurd – left one in a shrinking minority.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

239. “You haven’t offended me at all. You’ve made me think. That’s all.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

240. “I’ve also long since realized that the way to really engage children is to give out prizes; it’s amazing how it concentrates their minds.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

242. “Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

243. “He took a deep breath. ‘To marry me,’ he said quietly. It was easier than he thought. Icarus did not fall from the sky; the ground did not open; the earth did not wobble on its trajectory.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

244. “She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

245. “There were few other passengers: a man in an overcoat, his head sunk against his chest; a couple with arms around each other, impervious to their surroundings; and a teenage boy with a black scarf wound round his neck, Zorro-style. Isabel smiled to herself: a microcosm of our condition, she thought. Loneliness and despair; love and its self-absorption; and sixteen, which was a state all its own.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

246. “All our human endeavours are like that, she reflected, and it is only because we are too ignorant to realize it, or are too forgetful to remember it, that we have the confidence to build something that is meant to last.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

247. “He thought of all the ways that so many people felt about life. Life was a matter of regret – how could it be anything else? We knew that we would lose the things we loved; we knew that sooner or later we would lose everything, and beyond that was a darkness, a state of non-being that we found hard to imagine, let alone accept.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

248. “And she lowered her eyes at the gentle reproach, for she had learned her lesson, even if there would be occasional, but only very occasional, relapses; for none of us is perfect, except, of course, the ones we love, the things of home, our much appreciated dogs and cats, our favourites of one sort or another.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

249. “It is very difficult sometimes to keep upright.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

250. “In such a way is freedom of thought lost... By small cuts. By small acts of disapproval. By a thousand discouragements of spirit.”

— Alexander McCall Smith