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.
HARPER LEESometimes the Bible in the hands of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another.
More Harper Lee Quotes
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Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.
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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.
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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 of coffee, but wouldn’t dream of interrupting on the golf course.
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I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.
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Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?
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Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
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You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don’t.
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The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
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She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.
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I’m still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.
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Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.
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Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
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You can’t really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.
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Ladies in bunches always filled me with vague apprehension and a firm desire to be elsewhere.
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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.
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As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, ‘I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.
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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.
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You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
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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.
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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.
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Serving on a jury forces a man to make up his mind and declare himself about something. Men don’t like to do that. Sometimes it’s unpleasant.
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Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.
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As a reader I loathe introductions…Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.
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Things are always better in the morning.
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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.
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With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.
HARPER LEE