Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.
HARPER LEEWhen a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em.
More Harper Lee Quotes
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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.
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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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Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.
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I’m still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.
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You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
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Things are never as bad as they seem.
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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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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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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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But before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.
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People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.
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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.
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But sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down.
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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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It’s better to be silent than to be a fool.
HARPER LEE