Gary Jennings Quotes

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 contend, most seriously, that there is a real need for a good, thick, complete-as-possible dictionary of ‘What People Used to Call Things.’

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.

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.

I’m a writer. I write not only for a living, I write because I’m a writer.

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.

To get into Afghanistan, I bribed my way into a camel caravan of smugglers.

When I got back to Madison Avenue, I realized that copywriters made more than artists, so I switched.

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.

Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent.

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