Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “Lions walk on four legs,” observed Mma Makutsi. “Was this man walking on four legs? That can be a big giveaway, Mma.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

267. “I enjoy women’s conversation, and I think that helps me to describe them in fiction.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

268. “We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn’t matter.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

269. “Life happens, she thought; whatever we do, life just happens.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

270. “He tilted his hat back slightly, so that he could see the sky more clearly. It was so empty, so dizzying in its height, so unconcerned by the man who was crossing a field beneath it, and thinking as he did so.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

271. “If you knew what is was like to be another person, then how could you possibly do something which would cause pain? The problem, though, was that there seemed to be people in whom that imaginative part was just missing. It could be that they were born that way – with something missing from their brains – or it could be that they became like that because they were never taught by their parents to sympathise with others.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

272. “You can’t go through life saying “I hate mustard” because that is shutting off the possibility of change.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

273. “Well, that’s the important thing, isn’t it, Mma? To feel happiness, and then to remember it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

274. “The Morning After Coffee Bar was different from the mass-produced coffee bars that had mushroomed on every street almost everywhere, a development which presaged the flattening effects of globalisation; the spreading, under a cheerful banner, of a sameness that threatened to weaken and destroy all sense of place.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

275. “All suspects should be given the chance to telephone their lawyers or their mothers, and it would not be surprising if they chose to call their mothers. After all, your mother is fall more likely to believe in your innocence than your lawyer.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

276. “Eating with others was different from just talking to them – it was an act of commitment, a recognition of shared humanity. We all share these physical needs, it said; we are brothers and sisters in our vulnerability.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

277. “Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

278. “Sometimes it was difficult to be as tolerant as he wanted to be; but then, thought Ulf, the whole point about high ideals is that they are high. Being Swedish was not always easy, but you had to do your best, and hope that you didn’t slip, and become... well, Mediterranean in outlook.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

279. “When we dismiss or deny the hopes of others, she thought, we forget that they, like us, have only one chance in this life.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

280. “If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy her free time.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

281. “If we let the men talk about them and decide them, then suddenly we wake up and find out that the men have made all the decisions, and these decisions all suit men.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

282. “Very few people imagine their own future accurately. And then they’re often pleasantly surprised.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

283. “Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places which had yet to be bettered.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

284. “But please be careful – and never, never think that you are justified in doing something wrong just because you are trying to do something right.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

285. “And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We called him by a different name, then, and he did not live over at the Jews’ place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in places where we knew he liked to be.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

286. “The night is a very bad time for questions to which there are no answers.” Mr Badule looked at her. “You are very right, my sister. There is.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

287. “Telling a person with toothache that there are others with greater toothache than their own was no help at all.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

288. “None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well. Snakes were one of the tests which life sent for us, and there was no telling how we might respond until the moment arrived. Snakes and men. These were the things sent to try women, and the outcome was not always what we might want it to be.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

289. “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

290. “Who can’t like pigs? They’re wonderful creatures! I’ve always liked pigs.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

291. “Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

292. “You must not think that because one thing happens after another thing, then it is the first thing that causes the second thing. You must not think that, because it might not be true.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

293. “The good were worthy of note because they battled and that battle was a great story, whereas the evil were evil because of moral laziness, or weakness, and that was ultimately a dull and uninteresting affair.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

294. “I’m saying that forgiveness is like the rain. That’s all I’m saying. It makes things better. Rain does that too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

295. “People talk of the wrench of parting, and that, he felt, was exactly what it was. Take a metal object off a magnet and one would experience that – there was the draw, the tug, the flow of the bond even through the air, and then the sudden detaching as separation occurred. That was what it was like. That was human parting. You felt it; you felt the separation, just as you would feel the rending of tissue being pulled apart.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

296. “But we cannot always choose whose lives will become entangled with our own; these things happen to us, come to us uninvited, and Mma Ramotswe understood that well.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

297. “Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren’t enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

298. “Lists, she thought, are the stories of our lives; they give a picture of who we are and what we do every day. The.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

299. “It was a good place to sit, and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions – small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

300. “I write four or five a books a year. That means that I usually have one on the go. I am fortunate in being able to write quickly – 1000 words an hour.”

— Alexander McCall Smith