Gary Jennings Quotes

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.

– Gary Jennings

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.

– Gary Jennings

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

– Gary Jennings

I learned to interpret the ancient pictograph codices and read Nahuatl, the Aztec language.

– Gary Jennings

In the 20th century alone, there have been 1,600 books about the circus. My adding one more would be superfluous unless I do something totally new and different.

– Gary Jennings

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.

– Gary Jennings

I starved and slept on park benches. I wrapped myself in the pages of my manuscript to keep warm. For two and a half years I took odd jobs; nothing was going to deter me.

– Gary Jennings

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

– Gary Jennings

When I was in Thailand, I went into the up-country because Marco Polo didn’t get down into the flesh pots of Bangkok because they didn’t exist in those days.

– Gary Jennings

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

– Gary Jennings

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.’

– Gary Jennings