JOHN SANDFORD

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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?'

Most people like a little sex in their novels.

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 somewhat depressive.

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

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

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

If you do outline, you have to be aware of the problems that that kind of thing can cause.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.