Hillerman's Quotes

#1. Well you know I've been fan of Tony Hillerman's books for years.

Keith Carradine

#2. 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

#3. The fulfilment of your dream could cause a severe shock to many people and they will take ages to recover from it. But some of them will be permanently damaged by it and they will choose to hate you for your achievement.

Euginia Herlihy

#4. I don't know if I'd say I feel green, but I'm getting to know myself as an actor now in a way that I never did as a kid.

Gaby Hoffmann

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

Tony Hillerman

#6. In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.

Octavio Paz

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

Tony Hillerman

#8. 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

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

Tony Hillerman

#10. It is the essence of responsibility to put the public good ahead of personal gain

Robert Kennedy

#11. 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

#12. I was six and bushes were cool."
"Well, if I ever see a cool bush, I'll point it in your direction.

Rebecca Ethington

#13. How can you stop writing?

Tony Hillerman

#14. 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

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

Tony Hillerman

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

Tony Hillerman

#17. 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

#18. Virtually all families in the middle of the earnings distribution aspire to send their children to a school of at least average quality. (We'd think ill of any parent whose aspirations were lower.) The rub is that the best schools tend to be located in more expensive neighborhoods.

Bob Frank

#19. Playing 'Tetris' for 15 minutes is like meditation.

Ezra Koenig

#20. It is less about becoming a better person, and more of being better, as a person.

J.R. Rim

#21. Any party that writes off 25, 30, 35 percent of the American people is not going to be a winner.

Chuck Schumer

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

Tony Hillerman

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

Tony Hillerman

#24. 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

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

Tony Hillerman

#26. Architecture is politics.

Mitchell Kapor

#27. 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

#28. Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by, you only regret that you didn't see him do it.

Mark Twain

#29. 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

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

Tony Hillerman

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

Tony Hillerman