A Quote by John Sandford

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.
Everyone wants something that'll appeal to, like, 13-year-olds to 18-year-olds. Especially working in television and trying to pitch shows, they're like, 'We definitely want something that a 14-year-old will be, like, super-psyched about.' And I'm like, 'I don't know if my reality is appealing to a 14-year-old.'
My Finnish is... I'm sounding like a three-year-old, at my best. It's super hard to really have a conversation, unfortunately. I know a lot of words, and so reading signs and stuff is becoming better, or going to a supermarket. But some specific words, of course, you don't get in your first year.
I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.
I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don't know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying - please let me live until I am finished.
The other day my twelve-year-old says to me, I don't feel like I'm with you right now. You're in the car with me, you're checking your e-mail, you're not listening to me, I don't feel like I'm with you. And I say, You know what? That was your mother's gripe, too. And she was right. And you're also correct. When you cop to something, you get to the next level. In this case, the next level is: I just learned something from my twelve-year-old.
People didn't like me; I was loud and aggressive. People can take it from a 42-year-old, but when you're a little kid, and people are like, 'You're loud and awful,' you think, 'I guess I am awful,' so writing and figuring out how to put things into words was the way I felt better.
In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.
You don't want to be slavishly doing the same thing over and over again that everybody else has done, but at the same time, you're conscious of, "This is important. I owe something to my ten year old self right now. I need to respect that." I need for that kid who is obsessively reading comic books, I need there to be something rewarding for him where he's like, I didn't waste my time. I know what this is.
I guess I don't really know any other way to do it, it just feels like the natural way to do things for me. Like - if I'm writing a song - it has to have some sort of value. Or it only has some kind of value to me, if it's something really personal. It has to mean something to me. I guess it is a little uncomfortable, or it's a little embarrassing sometimes, to know that stuff that honest is out there. But, when I hand off the thing, when it's totally done and mastered and sent, I kinda feel like it doesn't belong to me anymore.
I feel with writing, so much of the time, I don't know how to tap in and be spontaneous and alive on a daily basis. So I don't write every day. I'm just not disciplined, and I can't be in the groove most of the time. I feel like I'm in the groove ten days a year or something. But with reading and research, I feel like I have this incredibly instinctive pleasure-driven process that ends up working out for me and inspiring me. It's almost like a maze, like I know eventually I'll hit the heart of my play if I read enough books.
Well, I just can't play the game anymore. I'm 63 years old, and I've been in the business for 40 years now. I take good advice and direction really well, but I don't need somebody that finished college two years ago to come in and tell me what I should be recording.
I prefer reading novels. Short stories are too much like daggers. And now that I'm done with my collection I'm more interested in different forms of writing and other kinds of narrative art. I'm working on a screenplay. But when I was working on Eileen, I definitely felt like I was taking a piss. Like, here I am, typing on my computer, writing the "novel." It wasn't that it was insincere, but there was a kind of farcical feeling I had when I was writing.
For me, fiction belongs to my inner being, is something essential which defines me - I am a fiction writer in the same way I am a woman, the same way I am dark-haired - it is something essential and structural. It's like an exogenous skeleton that keeps me going. And I don't know how I would manage to live without writing, working with words.
I could not write my books without the library's help. Even with the ease of Internet research, I find books to be indispensable when I am writing. ... Books make me laugh, cry, and think. They give me insight into history, and into the lives of people in other cultures. They help me make important decisions, and they provide endless entertainment. Hooray for libraries!
Number one, we need to get in shape, number two we need to shoot, number three, we need to learn self-defense, and number four, we need to study small-unit tactics... If you do not have 5,000 rounds of .223, 5,000 rounds of .22 and 1,000 rounds of handgun ammo, as a MINIMUM, you're wrong. We need to train our families how to shoot as well. We need to get food. We need to have a year's supply of food, two years supply of seeds, we need to have a year's supply of sundry items. That's what it means to be an American. We prepare for the worst but hope for the best.
I asked people who have already finished books for advice, which is akin to asking a mother with a four-year-old what childbirth is like.
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