Tony Hillerman Quotes

#1. You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.

Tony Hillerman

#2. From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

Tony Hillerman

#3. I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.

Tony Hillerman

#4. I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites.

Tony Hillerman

#5. An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

Tony Hillerman

#6. The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

Tony Hillerman

#7. I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

Tony Hillerman

#8. I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.

Tony Hillerman

#9. Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual's reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it.

Tony Hillerman

#10. Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

Tony Hillerman

#11. The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

Tony Hillerman

#12. Women are extremely important shapers of my own life.

Tony Hillerman

#13. IF you are not for yourself, who will be for you? If you are only for yourself, what are you? If not now, when?

Tony Hillerman

#14. How can you stop writing?

Tony Hillerman

#15. Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were.

Tony Hillerman

#16. I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading.

Tony Hillerman

#17. The highest praise a writer can give another is to say he wishes he had written his book. I wish I had written Forty Words for Sorrow. Giles Blunt has a tremendous talent. If you miss Forty Words for Sorrow, you'll miss one of best novels of 2001.

Tony Hillerman

#18. A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

Tony Hillerman

#19. Being Indian is not blood as much as it is culture.

Tony Hillerman