Alexander McCall Smith Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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There are lots of people who haven't been to drama school who have great talent and can be discovered.
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Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.
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If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
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A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
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To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to secure a social safety net below which no American would be allowed to fall.
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We think of the 1950s as an oppressive time in the culture, and indeed it was, but it was also in many ways a more secular moment, and one in which great scientific achievements flourished. I don't want to get too gauzy about this, but there was much more respect for science as a necessary part of society.
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A filial son to his father can be a traitorous subject to his ruler.
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We must honestly face our relationship with Great Britain.
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Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.
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Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.
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Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
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I love who I am and I love my life, but if I could be someone else, I'd be Beyonce in two seconds.
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When I hear theists and atheists pontificating on how they know God does or does not exist, I can only smile at the irrationality and, yes, vanity of the notion.
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I buy when other people are selling.
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My mom would always play me a lot of late-'50s, late-'60s rock.
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My wife Martha used to call me Ol' Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I'm in torture, when in truth, I'm in ecstasy. I don't do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling.
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Almost all of us growing up have played baseball on some level. It has an inside track with people. It has a unifying effect.
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I have long been impressed with the focus on politics and that focus being... from young people.
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When I was six, right before I started swimming, we went to a national competition here in Maryland and watched Michael Phelps swim, and I got to meet him afterwards, and I got his autograph. Fast forward nine years, and I'm at the Olympics with him, and it's like: 'Woah.'
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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
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I relate to the feeling that Da Vinci was often plagued by the idea that what he did wasn't good enough, that he was his harshest critic. He'd sometimes destroy what he was working on.
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The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.
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The fact that I am constantly immersed in the act of legal writing and editing has made me a better and more efficient creative writer and editor. In the end, lawyers need to tell compelling stories when they write a brief or other legal argument. A successful lawyer understands that the judge is merely a person who is going to read that brief, which should articulate a compelling reason for the judge to rule in that lawyer's favor. In other words, a legal advocate needs to get the judge to care. That's not dissimilar to what a creative writer does.
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We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.
