Tony Hillerman Quotes

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

The red light changed the color of her shirt, and her faded jeans, and her face. Her hair was disheveled, her expression intent, and, taken all together, she looked absolutely beautiful to Jim Chee. It would be a lot better, he thought, if friends didn't look like that.

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

Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what's beyond human power to change, and then to change the human's attitude to be content with the inevitable. - Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993

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

Had a doctor tell me I ought to quit this stuff [bourbon] because it was affecting my eardrums and I told him I liked what I was drinking better'n what I was hearing.

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 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.

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

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

I'm getting to be like a white man," she said. "I'm getting in a hurry for you to tell me what this is all about.

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.

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

How can you stop writing?

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

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.

Leaphorn didn't comment. It was the decision he would have made. Handle it on Navajo time. No reason to rush in there.