Tony Hillerman Quotes

21 quotes in 338 categories

• The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."
• 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…
• An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.
• A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.
• Although I wasnt able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the…
• 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…
• I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading.
• 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…
• Being Indian is not blood as much as it is culture.
• Women are extremely important shapers of my own life.
• 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,…
• How can you stop writing?
• I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.
• I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.
• You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.
• 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…
• Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects…
• From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.
• IF you are not for yourself, who will be for you? If you are only for yourself, what are you? If not now, when?

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