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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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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Place
Awful
York
Wonderful

More quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

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I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!
Alexander McCall Smith
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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.
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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Simple questions--and simple answers--were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Ritual is a terribly important, binding cement in a society. If we abandon formality and rituals, we're actually weakening the relationships that exist between people that bind.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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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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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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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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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.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Edinburgh used to be a haughty city.
Alexander McCall Smith
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And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.
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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Reality television, which turned its eye on people who were doing nothing but being themselves, was the perfect expression of this trend [of narcissism]. Let's look at ourselves, it said. Aren't we fascinating?
Alexander McCall Smith
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I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.
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 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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There is plenty of work for love to do.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I am capable of being idle.
Alexander McCall Smith