He agreed with David Hockney that an artist really had to be able to draw before anything else could be achieved.
Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your track...
For a moment, Isabel's eyes met those of someone looking out of the window, a thin-faced woman with her hair done up in a bun. The woman began a smile, but stopped, as if conscious of somehow transgre...
Families come in different ways... sometimes they are given to you, but sometimes you find them yourself, unexpectedly, as you go through life.
Everything, it seemed to Mma Ramotswe, had a waiting list—except the government taxman and the call, when it came, to leave this world. You could not argue with the agents of either of these: you paid...
Don’t be excessively judgmental, if you like, but always–always–be prepared to make a judgment. Otherwise you’ll go through life not really knowing what you mean.
Doctors are allowed to tell us things which they might not do themselves. They know what the right thing is, but they may not be able to do it themselves. That does not mean that their advice is bad a...
Do not allow the profession of which you are a member to induce you to take a bleak view of humanity. You will encounter all sorts of bad behavior but do not judge everybody by the standards of the lo...
Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?
Crisis. It was a time of sustained anxiety for anybody who read a newspaper or listened to the news on the radio, and that included his mother, Mrs. Florence Woodhouse, who was anxious at the best of...
Chapter ElevenShe did not spend long in the supermarket at Riverwalk, confining her purchases to supplies she would need for the next few days. There was beef for stew, a large pumpkin, a packet of be...
Caution was always required when you looked under a bed—anybody’s bed, even your own.
By comparison with such lives, our days were inconsequential indeed, and yet even though our canvas was small, still we could paint a masterpiece—as long as we were content for it to be a miniature.
But we cannot always choose whose lives will become entangled with our own; these things happen to us, come to us uninvited, and Mma Ramotswe understood that well.
But the problem is that even if you know that is the best thing to do, you often don't do it....it is true. It's as if there were two people inside you. One says: do this. Another says: do that. But b...
But that's exactly the problem, retorted Isabel. We're all stuck with the same tired and trusted ideas. If we refused to entertain the possibility of something radically different, then we'd never mak...
But some of us cannot see love, she said to herself, even when it is there, right before us, asking us to invite it in.
But for each person who is made happy by love, there will be many for whom it turns out to be a cause of regret. That is because it can be so fleeting; one moment it may take our breath away, the next...
But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?
Boys and men are the same people, in different clothes. Boys wear short trousers and men wear long trousers. But they are just the same if you take their trousers off.