Quotes by "Harper Lee"

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.

Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.

You deny them hope... You are telling them that Jesus loves them, but not much.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

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.

Просто есть такие люди, они... они чересчур много думают о том свете и потому никак не научатся жить на этом. (Мисс Моди Эткинсон - Глазастику Финч)

You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

- Prisimink dar kai ką: žiūrėti į praeitį ir matyti, kokie buvome vakar, prieš dešimt metų, visada lengva. Kur kas sunkiau suvokti, kokie mes dabar. Jei įvaldysi šį gebėjimą, tau seksis kuo puikiausiai.

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. [Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]

Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal (...). There is a tendency (...) for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious-because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe-some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others-some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

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.

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.