Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

People

Writing

Thought

Related Quotes:

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Most people like a little sex in their novels. "

John Sandford

Sex

Little

" 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

Look

Kind

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I'm an outdoors kind of guy. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Things fall apart and happen out of stupidity and carelessness. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I'm somewhat depressive. "

John Sandford

Somewhat

Depressive

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "