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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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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Enjoy
Helping
Women
Think
Thinking
Describe
Helps
Conversation
Fiction

More quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

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[Edinburgh] is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.
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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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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It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.
Alexander McCall Smith
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If you lose sight of the smaller accomplishments , you end up with an imbalance in your life.
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 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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I'm interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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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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New York is a wonderful place to be up, an awful place to be down.
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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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
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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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The Culture of Complaint... We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.
Alexander McCall Smith
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There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.
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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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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Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realize how widespread envy was.
Alexander McCall Smith