John Sandford Quotes

For any writers at all, read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That's all there is to it.

Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

I spend 99 percent of my time writing.

I would say, number one, don't worry about getting published. Just write. Number two, just write. Three is make sure you read.

Even as a little kid, I told lots of stories, and I wrote them down, and I loved reading fiction and fantasy.

My method is, I just sit down and write a book.

In Sydney, I gave what was billed as a masterclass to bright students of writing at the University of Sydney. But the term 'masterclass' was possibly over-egging the pudding. All I could do was pass on some lessons from my own life, and the most obvious is that if you want to be a writer, you must first have been a reader.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.

I'm constantly writing.

Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.

I never thought that it would take me so long to do something. I thought everything was temporary and sometimes the best thing you have working in your favor is a bad sense of time. In order to sit down and write a book that takes six years you have to have a screwed up sense of time because that's too daunting. No one is going to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say, "Okay, six years, here we go."

I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That's so many pages longhand.

I think it just has to do with getting older and getting better at what it was I was doing, and that I could take something small and kind of take my time with it. I think actually what that has to do with is I quit drinking. Before that I told myself I could only drink if I was - if I was writing, I had to be drinking. So I was on a timer, because eventually you get too drunk to write.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.