“I was a newspaper editor in the Army, and I know something about the A...” — John Sandford Quote

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

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

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.

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.

Most people like a little sex in their novels.

All's the government should do is keep the taxes and regulations at a manageable rate, keep a decent standing army and get out of the way.

Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.

On the death of his brothers, my dad lied about his age and joined the army in 1918. He was in the trenches long enough to be gassed and contract the early stages of tuberculosis from which he would eventually die just before my birth.

It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.