Quotes from John Sandford

My kids, who are grown now and living in L.A., are used to me packing up and taking off to somewhere weird.

It's interesting how people are sensitive to language and how it works.

If you actually hang out in the countryside, which I did, it's actually quite peaceful.

A lot of my friends were retiring from the newspaper business, and the newspaper pensions are not enormous.

I'm not saying that photographers are dumber than other people, but they are the folks who walk around with brilliant white lights in nighttime riots.

I spend a lot of time wandering around the countryside just looking at people, seeing how everything fits together.

People in California don't live in a place so much as they do a condition.

I'm just trying to normalize my life and get ready for the last 20 years or whatever I've got. It's a lot to take care of.

A lot of journalists are talented enough to write a mystery novel, and I would say that most of the top-end mystery writers actually started out as reporters. But there is more to it than just the writing; there's a learning process, and most journalists aren't willing to do it.

I have a problem with the way the media deals with a lot of law enforcement issues.

With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop.

That's my sense of how crime works: that it's not any kind of calculated evil driven by the devil, but just control disintegrating.

Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me.

The difference is this: If you write a good book, it'll get published. If you have a great screenplay, there is no guarantee.

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.

You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life.

If readers tell you that stretches of dialogue or narrative were too long, that they couldn't tell who was talking, that's something that can be fixed.

There are two worldviews in thriller writing: the paranoid view, like Chuck Logan's, that everything is inside a large clockwork. I like those books; they're intricate and thought out, but my view is that everything is chaotic and stupid. Chaos reigns, and civilized people do what they can to hold it back.

There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting.

I'm so horny the crack of dawn isn't safe.

Oh yeah, I heard you got born again.' she said. 'Which you needed since they fucked up the first time.

Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7

Time passes, but sometimes it beats the shit out of you as it goes.