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.”

“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.”

“I really do need the help of other people working with me.”

“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.”

“I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are.”

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

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

“Most people like a little sex in their novels.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”