Harper Lee
Well, they're Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn't dream of interrupting you at golf.Collection: Home
I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.Collection: Success
It was something I never expected to - I never expected the book would sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers.Collection: Death
Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.Collection: Courage
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.
Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.
From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.
So many writers don't like to write... I like to write, and sometimes I'm afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don't want to leave it. And as a result, I'll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.
Folks don't like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.
I'm a slow worker; I'm, I think, a steady worker.
I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.
You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.
The tradition of the South is not urban... I think we are a region of storytellers, naturally, just from our tribal instincts. We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance, motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertain each other by talking.
It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn't have an eventful childhood.
I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class southern life.
In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I'm concerned, that part is Greg's for life. I've had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I've always refused.
My daddy had a pocket watch that he wore at all times in court. I gave Greg the watch and showed him how Daddy used to use it.
This was life in the '30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.
I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.
People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.Collection: Powerful
As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don't think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, 'I'm probably no better than you, but I'm certainly your equal.Collection: Inspiring
Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.Collection: Wisdom
Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.Collection: Dirty
A man can condemn his enemies, but it's wiser to know them.Collection: Men
It's not necessary to tell all you know.Collection: Knows
You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.Collection: Shoes
Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.Collection: Book
Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of another... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.Collection: God
Things are always better in the morning.Collection: Morning
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.Collection: Writing
Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.Collection: Knowing
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.Collection: Writing
As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.Collection: Respect
Writing is something you'll never learn in any university or at any school. It's something that is within you, and if it isn't there, nothing can put it there.Collection: Writing
It's better to be silent than to be a fool.Collection: Fool
Don't you study about other folks's business till you take care of your own.Collection: Care
Sometimes the Bible in the hands of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another.Collection: Men
Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?Collection: Empathy
I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you're working at home they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn't dream of interrupting on the golf course.Collection: Dream
Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.Collection: Writing
She's an old lady and she's ill. You just hold your head high and be a gentleman. Whatever she says to you, it's your job not to let her make you mad.Collection: Jobs
Folks were doin' a lot of runnin' that nightCollection: Night
We’re so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we’ve got men like Atticus to go for us.Collection: Christian
Next morning I awoke, looked out the window and nearly died of fright. My screams brought Atticus from his bathroom half-shaven. "The world's endin', Atticus! Please do something -!" I dragged him to the window and pointed. "No it's not," he said. "It's snowing.Collection: Morning