...in other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama Interview - March 1964

We said good-bye, and Dill went inside the house. He evidently remembered he was engaged to me, for he ran back out and kissed me swiftly in front of Jem. "Yawl write, hear?" he bawled after us.

Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward.

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

There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

For the life of me, I did not understand how he[Atticus] could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic.

They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night.