Alexander McCall Smith Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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Let us go forward in this battle fortified by conviction that those who labour in the service of a great and good cause will never fail.
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God is not something I think about but something I experience as an energy, a Presence. I do find it easier to pray to a female Presence or an androgynous Presence.
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I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.
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I never thought 'Stairway to Heaven' was a long song. I loved how there was this part and then there was another part that was completely different.
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I rolled up my sleeves and said, 'I want to make a mark on this world.'
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If I had to do it all over, I'd be more secluded about it.
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I always wanted to be a writer. Maybe, had I been brought up in another generation, I might have just gone into writing rather than medicine - which is not to say that I didn't also have a great attraction towards the idea of being a healer. Fortunately, I've been able to combine the two in ways I could never possibly have imagined.
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I've tried coconut water straight up before, and to me, it's a little funky.
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Close friends consider me a literary snob.
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As a child, I had a serious illness that lasted for two years or more. I have vague recollections of this illness and of my being carried about a great deal. I was known as the 'sick one.' Whether this illness gave me a twist away from ordinary paths, I don't know; but it is possible.
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A long-lasting and sustained recovery will never be achieved through massive government spending programs.
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Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
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Sometimes I thank God... for cheeseburgers.
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One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.
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My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.
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The familiar trope of the woman in peril doesn't really interest me.
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Summer boarders often left clothes behind, and of what use were they to the landladies, for no rag-and-bone man ever called at their houses. The truth of the matter was that in less than a week I was well dressed from head to foot, all of these things being voluntary offerings, when in quest of eatables.
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I'm very aware and very conscious of the path I chose in life, and very aware of the path I didn't choose.
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You find the most important thing that really grabs you, and put it right up top. Don't bury the lead. Put it at the top. Best thing to do. Never go wrong that way. It's an immutable law of journalism. It just always works.
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I remember wearing the big oversized baseball and basketball jerseys and Timbaland boots. I was a tomboy growing up. I recently caught a picture of myself, and I was like, 'God! What was I thinking about?'
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Before I start, I trick myself into thinking I know what's going to happen in the story, but the characters have ideas of their own, and I always go with the character's choices. Most of the time I discover plot twists and directions that are better than what I originally had planned.
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The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends.
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It's nice. You meet some of your neighbors while you're there.
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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.
