Alexander McCall Smith Quotes - Page 3

Everybody has friends they dislike; people who they have slipped into relationships with, people they would not have chosen had they been more cautious, more circumspect.

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.

And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.

That my philosophy of life is, as far as possible, one of enjoyment. I'm not nihilistic.

But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?

It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!

To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.

Writers obviously have to bear witness to the harsh face of the age.

If you lose sight of the smaller accomplishments , you end up with an imbalance in your life.

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.

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.

Each of us is born into our own mysteries but the mystery of another might just take us in and embrace us. And then what a sense of homecoming, of belonging!