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" 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. "

John Sandford

Republican

Street

Miami

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John Sandford

Media

Political

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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" I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are. "

" 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. "

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

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

John Sandford

Sex

Little

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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