Quotes from Gary Jennings

If a man is to have a fault, it should be a passionate one, like insatiable curiosity. It would be a pity to be damned for something paltry.

He also made all Muslims publicly forswear that part of their Holy Quran which permits them to dupe, cheat and kill all who are not of Islam.

Mixtli a Ce-Malinali:

Tu haras que ese nombre sea vil, sucio y despreciable y toda la gente al decirlo escupira en el! - Mixtli a Ce-Malinali

That is the hazard in curiosity, I thought: all the certainties fragment and dissolve. A man curious enough and persistent enough might find even the round and solid ball of earth to be not so. He might be less proud of his faculty of reasoning when it left him with nothing whereon to stand. But then again, was not the truth a more solid foundation than illusion?

this: You tell me then that I must perish like the flowers that I cherish. Nothing remaining of my name, nothing remembered of my fame? But the gardens I planted still are young— the songs I sang will still be sung!

Once, when nothing was but night, they gathered, in a time forgotten— all the gods of greatest might— to plan the dawn of day and light. Here … at Teotihuácan.

The calendar and his glass and the solicitude of his juniors may tell a man that he is old, and he can see for himself that the world and all around him have aged, but secretly he knows that he is still a youth of eighteen or twenty. And what I have said of a man, I have said because a man is what I am. It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty and vitality are so much more to be treasured and conserved.

A man will believe anything that does not cost him anything," said

Citlaltépetl is as old as the world, but to this day, no man, native or Spaniard, has yet climbed all the way to the top of it. If anyone ever did, the passing stars would probably scrape him off his perch.

Of all that I have possessed in my life, my memories are the only things remaining to me. Indeed, I believe that that memories are the only real treasure any human can hope to hold always." - Mixtli (Aztec)

Of all that I have possessed in my life, my memories are the only things remaining to me. Indeed, I believe that memories are the only real treasure any human can hope to hold always." - Mixtli (Aztec)

leaning over me with the traditional greeting, "You have come to suffer. Suffer and endure." If children were born able to understand such a salutation, they would all squirm back into the womb, dwindle back into the seed. No doubt we did come into this world to suffer, to endure; what human being ever did not?

Everybody has done something about Marco Polo. It's the tiredest, most trite and worked-over subject in the world, and that was why it appealed to me, because I wanted to do something really new and different about something that had been worked over all these centuries, and I think I did.

When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called 'Aztec,' I had to make a deliberate effort to ignore a lot of the 'typically Mexican landscape' around me - banana and citrus groves, roses and carnations, burros and toros - because they did not exist in Mexico in the 15th century, the time of my book.

Collect adventures and experiences to reminisce about…go to far places, meet new people, eat exotic foods, enjoy all varieties of women, look on unfamiliar landscapes, see new things.

I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.

I could list hundreds of words I've come up against in the course of my work that did not exist in the era of which I was writing and for which I never could find a suitably old-time, archaic or obsolete substitute.