Harper Lee Quotes

190 quotes in 2385 categories

• 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…
• I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system - that is no ideal to me, it…
• Wordsworth was right when he said that we trail clouds of glory as we come into the world, that we are born with a divine…
• Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're…
• 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…
• Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood,
• Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra…
• Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.
• I didn't expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers…
• As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else for us to learn, except possibly…
• Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.
• I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.
• I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.
• Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward.
• I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.
• You can choose your friends, but you sho' can't choose your family.
• There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed,…
• Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a Klan... The Ku Klux's gone... It'll never come back.
• Never, never, never on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to, was a tenet I absorbed with my baby…
• I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system -- that is no ideal to me, it…

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