Joe R. Lansdale Quotes
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My father was just a hell of a guy. He had a real strong sense of honor, and he tried to pass that on to me. I like to think that I embrace that.
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My father had the most horrible racist rhetoric you ever heard, but he treated people all the same. I remember this rainstorm. A car broke down with these black people in it, and nobody would stop. My dad was a mechanic. He fixed the car for nothing. I remember looking at him when he got back in. He said, 'Well, they got those kids in the car.'
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Texas is so wrapped up in myth and legend, it's hard to know what the state and its people are really about. Real Texans, raised on these myths and legends, sometimes become legends themselves.
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I come from blue collar. I'm very working class.
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I've always done just pretty much what I wanted to do. I mean, I just did a thing for a small press called 'Zeppelins West' that's nothing but an absolute, over-the-top farce, almost like an Abbott & Costello, alternate-universe Western.
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I started writing when I was 9. My mother told me it was before that, but that was the first I remember.
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Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me pace and gave me a sense of action and adventure.
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Twain is my keystone. He reminds me of my people because that's the way they told stories.
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If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.
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My dad was born in 1909, my mother in 1914, I believe. Their life experiences were different than younger parents, so I grew up with a different perspective.
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I think I built my reputation by not worrying about it.
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I sold my first story when I was 21 in 1973.
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I lived below the poverty line when I was young and starting out as a writer. But my wife and I kept trying to do things better, as anyone with ambition does. But just because you're trying doesn't mean you're always going to succeed.
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I always write like the devil's behind me with a whip. I'm going to write because I like it. Then I'm going to write another.
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My father was the first person to introduce me to self-defense and martial arts, which I've been doing all my life now.
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I think the big thing is that Stephen King is just a phenomenon, and when he came along, for the first time horror was suddenly considered a very commercial genre. It had always been around, of course, but now, the books had the word 'horror' actually printed on their spines.
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I was a house dad. Once, my wife was working as a dispatcher at the fire department, and I was staying home and writing while baby-sitting my son, who hardly ever slept. So I wrote in twenty-minute patches. Some of that early stuff is just dreadful. I got a thousand rejects.
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The Westerns have probably affected me more than any one thing, Western-related material. I love Westerns.
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I never got a degree; I just started writing.
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'Bubba Ho-Tep' was an accidental story that turned out to be my first film adaptation, and it's still going strong in story and film.
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In some ways, I don't consider a single Hap and Leonard novel the best, but I consider them my best characters.
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I never felt poor. Our family euphemism was that we were broke, which I think psychologically gave you a different feeling. There were people far worse than we were.
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I write what I hear.
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Robert Bloch taught me about mixing horror and humor.