top of page
Exlpore more Reading quotes

"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."

"Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong."

"She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me."

"Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time."

"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."
Explore more quotes by 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."


"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."


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


"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 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."
bottom of page