John Sandford Quotations

Marshall didn't look anything like Lennon; he looked like something that would have eaten Lennon,

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. 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. Things fall apart and happen out of stupidity and carelessness. Davenport does represent order in this.

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

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.

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

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

Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.

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

Most people like a little sex in their novels.

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

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

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.

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

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.

As an individual with my own hurts, I go into the Garden (Gethsemane) as often as I need to. There I identify with the pain in the other, with my part in that pain, my part in tempting someone to wound me. I experience the other's pain, and God's pain, and am devastated - because their pain becomes my own. Feeling such anguish, I can forgive, or deeply repent, either for myself or on behalf of the other.

Catholics don't scream about Jesus, they scream about the bishop.

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world-the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.

Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?