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Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.

Harper Lee

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Harper Lee
Age: 89 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 28
Died: 2016
Died: February 19
Musician
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Monroeville
Alabama
Nelle Harper Lee
Salt
Please
Worth
Writer
Writing
Exorcism
Writes

More quotes by Harper Lee

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Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.
Harper Lee
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My objectives are very limited. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse.
Harper Lee
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I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you're working at home they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn't dream of interrupting on the golf course.
Harper Lee
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Serving on a jury forces a man to make up his mind and declare himself about something. Men don't like to do that. Sometimes it's unpleasant.
Harper Lee
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We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.
Harper Lee
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So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.
Harper Lee
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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.
Harper Lee
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You see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that's the way I want to live.
Harper Lee
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...in other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama Interview - March 1964
Harper Lee
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You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change...
Harper Lee
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Writing is something you'll never learn in any university or at any school. It's something that is within you, and if it isn't there, nothing can put it there.
Harper Lee
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She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.
Harper Lee
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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.
Harper Lee
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As a reader I loathe introductions...Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.
Harper Lee
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I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.
Harper Lee
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I do my best to love everybody
Harper Lee
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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.
Harper Lee
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Southern lawyers don't read novels much.
Harper Lee
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Nothin’s real scary except in books.
Harper Lee
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Let the dead bury the dead.
Harper Lee