John Sandford Quotes

A lot of cops in fiction are very depressive and are kind of downbeat, and they've got all kinds of existential angst that they're dealing with.

- John Sandford

People ought to be slapped up side of the head, not always get what they expect. That's why sometimes the bad guy gets away.

- John Sandford

I once paddled a canoe the length of the Mississippi River all the way from Itasca to New Orleans.

- John Sandford

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.

- John Sandford

If you do outline, you have to be aware of the problems that that kind of thing can cause.

- John Sandford

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.

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

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.

- John Sandford

Working for the 'Miami Herald' in 1972, I covered street action for both the Republican and Democratic national conventions in Miami and saw probably the most violent conventions ever - more violent than even 1968 in Chicago.

- John Sandford

Women just make interesting characters, especially when you're working against cliches.

- John Sandford

Before the Internet became so powerful, I toured extensively. With the rise of the Internet, touring apparently has become less important.

- John Sandford

When I was reporting crime... I never had the sense of clockwork conspiracies or some kind of imposing order of evil. What I sensed was things just sort of falling apart.

- John Sandford

Most people like a little sex in their novels.

- John Sandford

These characters are not spontaneous creations. They are engineered down to the last nut and bolt.

- John Sandford

I'm an outdoors kind of guy.

- 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.

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

Things fall apart and happen out of stupidity and carelessness.

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

Books set in Brooklyn and L.A. are often about people who are rootless, who want to go somewhere else. In the Midwest, though, the stories are about people who want to stay where they are - who like where they are.

- John Sandford

When you're writing two books a year, you really need some time off and don't want to use that down time for touring. I do like talking with readers, though; they can tell you important stuff.

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

Virgil Flowers fishes in the St. Croix where I fish for muskies near my house.

- John Sandford

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.

- John Sandford

I've always had a fascination with the technical and small-scale aspects of life - the national media seem to have more interest in the sweeping political views.

- John Sandford

I'm somewhat depressive.

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

They don't have a lot of crime in the countryside other than theft. But every once in a while, things turn ugly, and when they turn ugly, they turn very ugly.

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

Most people in protest mobs are pretty sincere and don't want to fight cops or break things.

- John Sandford

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.

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

As a journalist, I interviewed people, and you begin to feel different rhythms in speech, and you can use those things to help carve out a character.

- John Sandford

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.

- John Sandford

Combat stress isn't the only problem for soldiers isolated in Iraq - there are family issues, re-integration issues when soldiers go home on leave, loneliness.

- John Sandford

I was a newspaper editor in the Army, and I know something about the Army PR culture.

- John Sandford

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.

- John Sandford

I've always thought of myself as a journalist; that was what I did.

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

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

- John Sandford

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.

- John Sandford