Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

I have some good stories yet to tell.

I'm mostly influenced by life, what's around me, and my own childhood.

In every city, I had my favorite place. In Baltimore, it was Sabatino's.

I wanted to sing about things that moved me and experiences I had collected throughout life.

I've had tons of incredible conversations with people who say they got married or buried relatives to my songs.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

The most obvious difference between writing novels and memoirs is that my memoirs are true stories, and explore certain experiences I've lived, and thus operate within the boundaries of memory and fact.

We have had triumphs, we have made mistakes, we have had sex.

The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.

There is a history in all men's lives.

I do sing about drinking, but it's in a party way. I don't sing about drinking in a drowning-my-sorrows way, like in George Jones's "If Drinking Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)."

I'm just singing about my own life. Singing about all the little stories in my life and the things I've been through.

Memories are like moonbeams; we do with them what we want.

The old Catholic parties hounded me with a Christian hatred from station to station, city to city, one stage to another.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

When I look back, I don't remember the best of the best. I don't remember arena shows with 20,000 people. I remember funky little bar gigs where nobody shows up. The weirdest of the weird are what you retain.

There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.

The whole thing about my books and my life is that I create drama's always around me.

My buddies and I, we all went to law school together, and once we started working in different cities, we all did crazy stuff, and we'd write e-mails to each other about the stuff we would do. And my friends thought my e-mails were really funny and they said, "Dude, why don't you put this up on a Web site. You know people would love to read this."

It's our memories that make us who we are. Without them, we're nothing. If that means we have to hurt sometimes, it's worth it.

I'm much more into someone who is telling stories than somebody who is writing a record about their breakup. It's just more interesting for me.

we are nothing more than the sum of our memories and experiences

I had a cheat sheet because I knew Tarell [Alvin McCraney]. His movie is largely autobiographical. I knew about certain events in his life and some of the people he talks about. I had visited the place where he lived many times so I understood innately what that was.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.