Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.

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.

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.

When you're at the top, there's only one way to go.

I came to the conclusion that people were just peculiar, I withdrew from them, and never thought about them until I was forced to.

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

Folks don't like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.