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Botswana is actually very peaceful. It's democratic. It never was in debt. They've been fortunate, they've had diamonds.

Alexander McCall Smith

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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Fortunate
Debt
Democratic
Actually
Never
Diamonds
Diamond
Peaceful

More quotes by 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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It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Who can't like pigs? They're wonderful creatures! I've always liked pigs.
Alexander McCall Smith
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New York is a wonderful place to be up, an awful place to be down.
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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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.
Alexander McCall Smith
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My parents were very supportive and always encouraged us. My father was a gentle, nice man. My mother was quite a colourful character and a keen reader who encouraged me to write.
Alexander McCall Smith
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There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I enjoy women's conversation, and I think that helps me to describe them in fiction.
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
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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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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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Everything has been something before.
Alexander McCall Smith
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It's a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.
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 are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.
Alexander McCall Smith
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A wedding was a strange ceremony, she thought, with all those formal words, those solemn vows made by one to another whereas the real question that should be put to the two people involved was a very simple one. Are you happy with each other? was the only question that should be asked to which they both should reply, preferably in unison, Yes.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry.
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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There is plenty of work for love to do.
Alexander McCall Smith