Tony Hillerman Quotes

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

  Tony Hillerman

  Wind, Smell, Landscape

  48 Copy quote

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

  Tony Hillerman

  Rain, Order, Somewhere Else

  Tony Hillerman (1990). “Coyote waits”, Harpercollins

  35 Copy quote

• 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.

  Tony Hillerman

  Eye, Reality, Men

  13 Copy quote

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

  Tony Hillerman

  Writing, Law, Firsts

  Tony Hillerman, Ernie Bulow, Ernest Franklin (2004). “Talking Mysteries: A Conversation with Tony Hillerman”, p.31, UNM Press

  19 Copy quote

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

  Tony Hillerman

  Writing, Bags, Stuff

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Ifs

  7 Copy quote

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

  Tony Hillerman

  Smart, Writing, Two

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Spring, Reality, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Giving, Missing

  4 Copy quote

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

  Tony Hillerman

  Mind, Trying, Stories

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Home, Elderly

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Tony Hillerman

  House, Vietnam, Might

  11 Copy quote

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

  Tony Hillerman

  Blood, Culture, Indian

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Attitude, Two, Mind

  6 Copy quote

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

  Tony Hillerman

  Book, Humanity, Trying

  6 Copy quote

• Women are extremely important shapers of my own life.

  Tony Hillerman

  Important, My Own, My Own Life

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Funny, Graduation

  52 Copy quote

• How can you stop writing?

  Tony Hillerman

  Writing

  4 Copy quote

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

  Tony Hillerman

  Book, Reading, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Teenager, Oklahoma

  12 Copy quote

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