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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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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
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Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Firsts
Organically
Book
Overall
First
Plot
Right
Scene
Focus
Lines
Grows
Getting
More quotes by Alexander McCall Smith
My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances weve become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.
Alexander McCall Smith
The good were worthy of note because they battled and that battle was a great story, whereas the evil were evil because of moral laziness, or weakness, and that was ultimately a dull and uninteresting affair.
Alexander McCall Smith
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
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...
Alexander McCall Smith
Botswana is actually very peaceful. It's democratic. It never was in debt. They've been fortunate, they've had diamonds.
Alexander McCall Smith
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
There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.
Alexander McCall Smith
You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.
Alexander McCall Smith
Life consists of positive and negative features, and I think that it is permissible to write about both.
Alexander McCall Smith
The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.
Alexander McCall Smith
I'm interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.
Alexander McCall Smith
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
If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.
Alexander McCall Smith
I've also long since realized that the way to really engage children is to give out prizes it's amazing how it concentrates their minds.
Alexander McCall Smith
Well, Id say all of us are a combination of moods and emotions. In my day to day life I dont go around skipping, but at times one can feel sheer exhilarating joy at the world.
Alexander McCall Smith
But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn't it? - and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.
Alexander McCall Smith
Dogs are in on our human silliness lions are not.
Alexander McCall Smith
Who can't like pigs? They're wonderful creatures! I've always liked pigs.
Alexander McCall Smith
But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?
Alexander McCall Smith
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.
Alexander McCall Smith
