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

Alexander McCall Smith

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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Built
Unless
Persons
Heavyweight
Person
Heavyweights
Take
Bout
Traditionally
Prepared

More quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

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Small things may be important to us to be a sometime anything is sometimes something.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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The Okavango Delta is an astonishing sight: the great Okavango River, rather than flow towards the sea, flows inland, into the sands of the Kalahari.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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I've always had a creative urge and I get immense satisfaction from creating something because it feels like I'm making sense of the world and imposing order on it.
Alexander McCall Smith
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As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.
Alexander McCall Smith
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It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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!
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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I write four books a year. I'm very fortunate that I write quickly around 3,500 words a day. Being strict about delineating my writing time and personal life, as well as keeping distractions at bay, is the only way I can accomplish this.
Alexander McCall Smith
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As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don't think they look to me for political guidance.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Daughters could survive a powerful mother, but boys found it almost impossible. Such boys were often severely damaged and spent the rest of their lives running away from their mothers, or from anybody who remotely reminded them of their mothers either that, or they became their mothers, in a desperate, misguided act of psychological self defence.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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?
Alexander McCall Smith
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Old friends, like old shoes, are comfortable. But old shoes, unlike old friends, tend not to be supportive: it is easier to stumble and sprain an ankle while wearing a pair of old shoes than it is in new shoes, with their less yielding leather.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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At night we are all strangers, even to ourselves.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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.
Alexander McCall Smith