Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Everybody knows, she thought, that we have a skeleton underneath our skin; there’s no reason to show it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

238. “That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness – any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

239. “It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intellectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with out character.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

240. “Insincerity had never come easily to her, but good manners required it on occasion, even if a superhuman effort was needed.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

241. “Mma Ramotsew accepted her large slice of cake and looked at the rich fruit within it. There were at least seven hundred calories in that, she thought, but it did not matter; she was a traditionally built lady and she did not have to worry about such things.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

242. “Everybody was a potential assailant; nobody spoke to one another for fear of being misinterpreted; nobody comforted another, put an arm around a shoulder-to do so would be to invite accusation.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

243. “If people came at you and started to scratch you, then of course you had the right to sit on them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

244. “What else do you need in life, Mma? You have a fine husband – which is one of the most important things that anybody can have.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

245. “Many of my books are written from a female perspective. I rather enjoy the take that women have on the world, and certainly I enjoy the conversations that women have.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

246. “Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don’t need to be told what to do.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

247. “Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifing across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like small white stones.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

248. “I’m very interested in tea. I wouldn’t mind being involved in some aspect of the tea industry.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

249. “Believe me, there’s nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

250. “But he’ll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one’s soul.”

— Alexander McCall Smith