Tony Hillerman Quotes


"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
(Related: Being, College, English, Project)

"I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it."
- Tony Hillerman
(Related: Books, Humanity)

"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
(Related: Home, People, Elderly, Old, Post, Right)

"I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading."
- Tony Hillerman
(Related: Old, Reading, Will, Writing, Years)

"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
(Related: Time, Attitude, Mind, Respect)

"I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind."
- Tony Hillerman
(Related: Mind)

"Being Indian is not blood as much as it is culture."
- Tony Hillerman
(Related: Being, Blood, Culture)

"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
(Related: Time, Prison, Sense, Talk, Veterans, Vietnam)

"Women are extremely important shapers of my own life."
- Tony Hillerman
(Related: Life, Women)

"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
(Related: War, Drugs, Liquor, states)

"You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart."
- Tony Hillerman
(Related: People)

"How can you stop writing?"
- Tony Hillerman
(Related: Writing)