“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”

There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep ’em all away from you. That’s never possible.

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 is a living, working reality.

It’s better to be silent than to be a fool.

A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.

People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.

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.