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A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss.

Alexander McCall Smith

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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Loss
Fiction
Powerful
Theme

More quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

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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.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.
Alexander McCall Smith
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The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that's how it should be.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I see no point in being despondent. We might as well enjoy ourselves during our brief tenure of this life.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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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.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Edinburgh used to be a haughty city.
Alexander McCall Smith
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There is plenty of work for love to do.
Alexander McCall Smith
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A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?
Alexander McCall Smith
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Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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.
Alexander McCall Smith
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It seems to me that we're in danger of losing sight of certain basic civic values in society by allowing the growth of a whole generation of people who really have no sense of attachment to society.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I have three older sisters, so we were a reasonably large family and, in general, a happy one.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I'm very interested in tea. I wouldn't mind being involved in some aspect of the tea industry.
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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The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.
Alexander McCall Smith
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We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.
Alexander McCall Smith
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We should be careful of the insults we fling at others, lest they return and land at our feet, newly minted to apply to those who had first coined them.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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