I do my best to love everybody

Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.

I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.

You can pet him, Mr. Arthur. He's asleep.

It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself.

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.