John Sandford Quotes

I'm so convinced that hiking helps my writing that I recently decided to offer a series of hiking-writing workshops to see if others had the same experience.

I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.

Nature has always been important to me. It has always been in my music.

Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

I tell my writing students that everything is material; just pay attention.

I think writers are observers and watchers. We always have our ears open and eyes open, so I might see something in everyday life that inspires me. And I think that's probably more than anything else. Everyday life is where I get my inspiration.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

I love using my imagination. I love writing about animals.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you're a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you're casually talking to says something that makes you so mad - you can create an entire scenario around that.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.

The best thing you can do when you're not feeling funny is go out and get more stimuli from the world, get out and walk around, read a book, go talk to some birds or a dog and replenish the well, as it were.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

Well, you know, writers just suck up new experiences - we're just like the vacuum cleaners of newness.

I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.

If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.