603 Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader.

If you lose sight of the smaller accomplishments , you end up with an imbalance in your life.

There is this intimacy still in Botswana. It's a country of just under two million people, and there's this sense of connectedness, in that people tend to be related to one another.

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.

The point of opera is that people are moved by the emotions and music.

I have three older sisters, so we were a reasonably large family and, in general, a happy one.

I think that we've made great moral progress in the second half of the 20th century in many respects, and particularly in relation to human rights but I think that we are losing sight of some of the values of concern for others, and self-respect and respect for others.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them properly. We should do that. We should look at them and think about how lucky we are to have them.