Tony Hillerman Quotations

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.

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

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

Women are extremely important shapers of my own life.

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.

How can you stop writing?

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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 into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.

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