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The Culture of Complaint... We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.

Alexander McCall Smith

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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Always
Blame
Bargain
Things
Looking
Bargains
Everyone
Compensation
Desire
Complaints
Culture
Complain
Others
Misfortunes
Form
Tied
Live
Complaining
Complaint

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The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.
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I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.
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I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!
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There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.
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Dating is really all about sex. In the conventional context, this means that the man invites the woman to go through a social encounter, the ultimate purpose of which is sexual engagement.
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We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.
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We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.
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She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.
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If you lose sight of the smaller accomplishments , you end up with an imbalance in your life.
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I'm interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.
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They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them properly. We should do that. We should look at them and think about how lucky we are to have them.
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Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realize how widespread envy was.
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It is not enough just to identify a problem there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.
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One of the most destructive things that's happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together - which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.
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It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.
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Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.
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Who can't like pigs? They're wonderful creatures! I've always liked pigs.
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Every small wrong, every minor act of cruelty, every act of petty bullying was symbolic of a greater wrong. And if we ignored these small things, then did it not blunt our outrage over the larger wrongs?
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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
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I can read more languages than I speak! I speak French and Italian - not very well, alas, but I can get by. I read German and Spanish. I can read Latin (I did a lot of Latin at school.) I'm afraid I do not speak any African languages, although I can understand a little bit of the Zulu-related languages, but only a tiny bit.
Alexander McCall Smith