603 Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

There is room in history for all of us.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner..., things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.

The wider your readership, the greater the chances of offending your readers.

I see no point in being despondent. We might as well enjoy ourselves during our brief tenure of this life.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.