This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.