Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

216. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

233. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “It would be wonderful to have a guru; it would be like having a social worker or a personal trainer, not that people who had either of these necessarily appreciated the advice they received.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

248. “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

249. “I’m interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

250. “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