C.W. McCall Quotes

I am often thanked by people for inventing the term traditionally built. The people who give me thanks for this are often traditionally built themselves.

I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.

I am capable of being idle.

I enjoy women's conversation, and I think that helps me to describe them in fiction.

Life consists of positive and negative features, and I think that it is permissible to write about both.

Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.

I write four or five a books a year. That means that I usually have one on the go. I am fortunate in being able to write quickly - 1000 words an hour.

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

New York is a wonderful place to be up, an awful place to be down.

Simple questions--and simple answers--were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.

Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout.

My parents were very supportive and always encouraged us. My father was a gentle, nice man. My mother was quite a colourful character and a keen reader who encouraged me to write.

Edinburgh used to be a haughty city.

The Okavango Delta is an astonishing sight: the great Okavango River, rather than flow towards the sea, flows inland, into the sands of the Kalahari.

It's a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.

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

I am easily persuaded to continue to have fun.

The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.

Many of my books are written from a female perspective. I rather enjoy the take that women have on the world, and certainly I enjoy the conversations that women have.

I've always had a creative urge and I get immense satisfaction from creating something because it feels like I'm making sense of the world and imposing order on it.

Ritual is a terribly important, binding cement in a society. If we abandon formality and rituals, we're actually weakening the relationships that exist between people that bind.

If the general attitude of Canadians toward their mighty neighbor to the south could be distilled into a single phrase, that phrase would probably be "Oh, shut up."

Government is violence masquerading as answers to strangers' problems using other peoples' money.

I wish my mind was a dog and I could train it to go sit.

NSA, the only part of government that actually listens.

They're all... looking... a little... nervous right now

See it, learn it, do it all!

One of the reasons I picked Pacifica was because, for a lot of classes and for your thesis, you could do artwork because of the Jungian slant of it all, and that really called to me.

I didn't have a calling to be a therapist. I really went to Pacifica for a very specific kind of life experience, to really kind of find my path in a deeper way.

I knew that I was naturally good at [therapy] because I was kind of that person in my circle of people in my life.

I used to be a person that wasn't able to laugh at myself easily.

I was supporting other people's creative dreams and I wasn't supporting my own. I didn't feel like I could really serve people having that kind of process within me.

Creating safety is your first job [as therapist], and then once that's established, you can use many tools to help someone see the folly in their thinking.

I had a mother complex going on and I was projecting all my negative mother stuff onto her and all of my need for her to love me and to make me whole and to approve of me.

. . . the solution is not to toss youthful offenders into jail or prisons. We long ago recognized alcoholism to be a disease, and abondoned efforts to treat alcoholics simply by locking them up.

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights. You can't ever put the pieces back together after they hit home.

Has anyone sen Mr Snark " "I saw him in the tunnel about 15 minutes ago." "Oh no " wailed Dr Ferman "he will have been atomised." "Oh dear" muttered an MP. "Bye-election.

We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed.

Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.

Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process.

The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world.

If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy her free time.

He evidently did not care that they were in full view of a cluster of dog-owners walking their dogs. He stopped and took her in his arms, kissing her passionately and urgently.

People don’t talk about mercy very much these days—it has a rather old-fashioned ring to it. but it exists and its power is quite extraordinary

…the world was a vale of tears—it always had been.

Mma Ramotswe reflected on how easy it was to find oneself committed to a course of action simply because one lacked the courage to say no.

Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so.

The recipe for each child is just for that child, even if it is the same mother and father.

Be your OWN celebrity!

A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most.