Quotes from Tony Hillerman

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Women are extremely important shapers of my own life.

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.

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.

Or, at least, he wasn't sure she was willing to marry Jim Chee as he currently existed—a just-plain cop and a genuine sheep-camp Navajo as opposed to the more romantic and politically correct Indigenous Person.

I never start one of these books in which they appear without being motivated by a desire to give those who read them at least some insight into the culture of a people who deserve to be much better understood. —Tony Hillerman

traditional values of his people, which made wealth a symbol for selfishness, and had caused a friend of his to deliberately stop winning rodeo competitions because he was getting unhealthily famous and therefore out of harmony.

In life, ritual dancing for the Zuñi is sort of a perfect expression of . . ." He paused, searching for the word. "Call it ecstasy, or joy, or life, or community unity. So what do you do when you're beyond life, with no labors to perform? You spend your time dancing.

The Land of Room Enough, and Time.

The sky lightened now. Far ahead, they could see where the Pacific half of the blizzard had reached the Chuska range. Its cold, wet air met the dry, warmer air on the New Mexico side at the ridgeline. The collision produced a towering wall of white fog, which poured down the slopes like a silent slow-motion Niagara.

That just two things we know for certain. That we're born and in a little while we die. It's what we do in the time between that matters. That's what the One Who Made Us thinks about when he decides what happens to us next.

She was a young woman with that pink complexion which made Jimmy Chee wonder why the white men called Indians redskins.