Harper Lee Quotes

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

It's not necessary to tell all you know.

You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.

Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.

Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of another... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.

Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.

Things are always better in the morning.

Don't you study about other folks's business till you take care of your own.

Try fighting with your head for a change... it's a good one, even if it does resist learning.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.

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 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.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

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

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.

People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don't know what they're doing. They're in the category of those who write; they are not writers. Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward. Writing is selfish and contradictory in its terms. First of all, you're writing for an audience of one, you must please the one person you're writing for. Yourself.

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.