Harper Lee

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.

Folks don't like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

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

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.

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.

Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

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.

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.

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

Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.