Harper Lee Quotes

I class myself as a manual laborer.

I abhor this dirty work but when one is employed to sweep chimneys, one must black one’s fingers.

Don't call me 'gentleman'. I work for a livin'.

My father was a manual worker.

They see me as an ordinary guy, like a construction worker or the guy who delivers your piano.

The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile.

Coming from a working-class background, where my father did manual labor, was a good grounding; I was obsessed with getting a job or getting out of the house at 15.

I was the night foreman of a galvanizing factory, which is hot and smelly and dirty and miserable.

My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.

I've had some pretty awful jobs that I don't miss, like working on a nightclub door, or compiling VIP lists at 3 A.M. in the morning, but sometimes it's just got to be done.

My father's family came from Virginia and Philadelphia. He wasn't a brother who talked a lot. He was a workingman, a quiet, blue-collar dude.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job.

Ninety percent of my best friends back home are plumbers, electricians, builders, or landscapers. Most of our dads worked in trades.

I've worked in a factory. I was a garbage man. I worked in a post office. It's not that long ago. I like to think that I'm just a regular guy.

An assembly of tailors and blacksmiths....

I'm very blue collar myself. So it was easy for me to embody that in a sense. It's much harder for me to embody Norrell than it is to embody Terry Donovan.

A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.

Dad was a machinist who had to work hard - harder than any man I have ever known.

Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.

I think if I'd never had found pro wrestling, I'd be a blue collar guy, working a 9-to-5 job.

I can relate to ranchers and roughnecks and professional game guides and farmers and homemakers.

I did a lot of heavy-lifting - construction, demolition, that kind of thing. Dusty, dirty work.

Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil smelling-place.

I come from a minimum wage working world, as we all did for at least some part of our lives, and that is never out of my rearview. I've never forgotten how much your feet hurt after you've stood on them for like 12 hours. And how the drudgery of a job you hate craps on your entire life; how you treat other people, how you treat yourself, and it really was getting to me.