“You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

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.

It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

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

But sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down.

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.

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, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

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 do my best to love everybody.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

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.

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 quite different from people who must write.

My objectives are very limited. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse.

Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.

The work of the Spirit is to impart life, to implant hope, to give liberty, to testify of Christ, to guide us into all truth, to teach us all things, to comfort the believer, and to convict the world of sin.

The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

Zhang Yimou tried to use martial arts to talk about Chinese culture, Chinese people. What do they think, what do they want and what do they hope.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

I realised long ago that skirts are hopeless. Anytime I hear a man say he prefers a woman in a skirt, I say, ‘Try one. Try a skirt.’

Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

No one is moved to act, or resolves to speak a single word, who does not hope by means of this action or word to release anxiety from his spirit.

I dreamed about these moments, and I think I hoped I would have them, but you don’t know. So when the lucky break hits, it’s like being Cinderella and hopefully midnight doesn’t come.