Harper Lee Quotes

I was born during the Depression in a little community just outside Waco, and I grew up listening to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio.

I was a Depression kid, growing up in Oklahoma.

We would go down to Riverside, California, which is very poor now, but that's where my grandfather grew up. He grew up during the Depression in Riverside.

I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. It was all very normal.

I have never seen a picture of my mother. My mother's family never owned a photograph of her, which tells you everything you need to know about where I'm from and what the world was like for the people who gave me life.

A middle child, I was born in the depths of the Great Depression. My dad and mom were factory workers, struggling to make ends meet.

I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger.

'Rainwater' was particularly special because it was a complete departure from the suspense novels. It's set in the Great Depression and based on an incident that occurred when my dad was a boy.

I grew up in southern Sudan, one of nine children. Our life was simple but very happy.

Environment does shape you. My environment, in a pit family, in a pit village, with nine kids in total.

Growing up in America, even in the rougher parts of Elizabeth, I had two nice playgrounds to choose from as a child.

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

I grew up in Kentucky, but I did not grow up like that. I had heat, and I didn't have to shoot my dinner or anything.

In life, there are a lot of expectations. I see why in the South, especially, there's a simple existence. People, whether they're cowboys or farmers or ranchers, you just get up, you do your job, you have a family, you come home.

I grew up on a dirt road with brothers.

So as my kids will tell you, they had a pretty normal life.

There were five children in my family, and arguing was how we used to entertain ourselves.

Childhood has definitely been invented, hasn't it? I think that's because people had children later, and we appreciate and cherish childhood a lot more.

If I wrote a memoir, it would be like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'

When I was young, my family didn't go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn't afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries.

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.

We lived, until I was 12 or so, in communal apartment with five different families and the same kitchen, in two little - my brother and me and my parents. It was hell, but it was a common thing. My father was not general or admiral, but he was colonel. He was teaching in military academy military topography.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.

When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge.