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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
Fiction
Enjoy
Helping
Women
Think
Thinking
Describe
Helps
Conversation

More quotes by 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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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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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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Dating is really all about sex. In the conventional context, this means that the man invites the woman to go through a social encounter, the ultimate purpose of which is sexual engagement.
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's a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.
Alexander McCall Smith
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The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved that is such a miracle, they feel such a miracle.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Writers obviously have to bear witness to the harsh face of the age.
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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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
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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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But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?
Alexander McCall Smith
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To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Dogs are in on our human silliness lions are not.
Alexander McCall Smith
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As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don't think they look to me for political guidance.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.
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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The Okavango Delta is an astonishing sight: the great Okavango River, rather than flow towards the sea, flows inland, into the sands of the Kalahari.
Alexander McCall Smith