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 SandfordThey 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.
John SandfordI've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.
John SandfordWomen had been on the verge of taking over the world-the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.
John SandfordMost people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.
John SandfordWhen 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?'
John SandfordAs an individual with my own hurts, I go into the Garden (Gethsemane) as often as I need to. There I identify with the pain in the other, with my part in that pain, my part in tempting someone to wound me. I experience the other's pain, and God's pain, and am devastated - because their pain becomes my own. Feeling such anguish, I can forgive, or deeply repent, either for myself or on behalf of the other.
John SandfordGonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7
John SandfordThere's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting.
John Sandford