I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

Sometimes the Bible in the hands of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another.

It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike--in the second place, folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do.

Calpurnia evidently remembered a rainy Sunday when we were both fatherless and teacherless. Let to its own devices, the class tied Eunice Ann Simpson to a chair and placed her in the furnace room. We forgot her, trooped upstairs to church, and were listening quietly to the sermon when a dreadful banging issued from the radiator pipes, persisting until someone investigated and brought forth Eunice Ann saying she didn't want to play Shadrach any more - Jem Finch said she wouldn't get burnt if she had enough faith, but it was hot down there.

Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?

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.

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