Tony Hillerman Quotations

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.

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

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

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.

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, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites.

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.