Quotes from Joseph Kanon

I like the busy-ness of office life. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that I love the solitary nature of writing. What happens is that you write when you're ready.

I think most writers' houses are disappointing. What's much more atmospheric and interesting are the places they wrote about.

Being an editor doesn't make you a better writer - or vice versa. The worst thing any editor can do is be in competition with his writer.

You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.

Life is like that, don't you think? Mostly bad choices. All you can do is keep your balance between them.

He was the first young man Alex had met since he arrived, all the others buried or missing, irretrievable. Then a few dragging steps and Alex saw why: a Goebbels clubfoot had kept him out of war.

reality itself become something random, inexplicable.

How does anyone sleep?" "You don't hear them after a while," Martin said." You get used to it." Maybe Martin had, new to Berlin. But what about the others, who remembered huddling in shelters every night , waiting to die, listening to the engine sounds how near?-the whining thrust as the nose was pulled up, free of the weight of it bombs, now floating somewhere overhead.

Shabby suits and no stockings, but they had survived, waited in hiding or miraculously escaped, for this new chance, the idea the Nazis hadn't managed to kill.

Durak," he said, spitting it. When

They stay for each other .The Americans don't leave because the Russians-"He stopped. "But of course they'll have to. It's not reasonable,"he said, a French use of word. "Why would the Russians stay? If Germany were neutral. Not a threat anymore.

One thing you learn in police work is how to wait. Now you, you hate to wait. You'd make coffee nervous.

he realized that this visit, all his visits, were really trips to a cemetery, paying respects at the grave, the way they had visited his father's, flowers in hand, his mother solemn, Leon bored and uncomfortable, not knowing, as he did now, that she wasn't visiting his father but some younger part of herself, what she used to be.

At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.

When you're editing, you want to be the perfect appreciator, not another writer.

John Sandford