John Sandford Quotes

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?'

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Most people like a little sex in their novels.

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.

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

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

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

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