John Sandford

“I'm somewhat depressive.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“I'm an outdoors kind of guy.”

“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?'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”