Joe R. Lansdale Quotes
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The simple fact is, the more people who buy your books, the more are likely to read you. That's what I'd like to see happen.
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I figure I can be artistic, but I work like a blue-collar person, too, and I'm serious about that.
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People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they're worth reading.
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When you live in a small town behind the Pine Curtain, you live inside your head a lot.
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A lot of friends I went to school with were criminals.
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People in my town were not that into reading, but the overblown way Texans told stories was important.
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I didn't read Western novels much until I was in my twenties, but I had a diet of them on film and TV, as well as other things, of course.
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I don't plot, and I don't plan. I like to be surprised like the reader.
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My grandmother on my mother's side lived to nearly 100 years old, and she had seen Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as a little girl and had come to Texas by covered wagon.
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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 don't want people reading my books just because they're horror or mysteries. I want them to read them because they're Joe Lansdale books.
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I've always felt that if you pay your bills and can take care of yourself without too much stress, then it's a pretty damn good life.
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I've never liked the publishing world's determination to pigeonhole every writer into a genre.
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Psychologists and psychiatrists send me cards and say, 'Hey, I love your books.'
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I always disliked that anytime you had gays represented in - and there were some exceptions, certainly - but represented in popular fiction, they were usually the goofy neighbor next door, you know? And I just thought, 'Well, I know a lot of gay people, and they're just as varied as the heterosexual people I know.'
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I was born in the '50s - 1951. So I grew up during that part of the '50s when everything was supposed to be at its best in America, they claimed, and then eased into the '60s.
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I work in the mornings almost exclusively.
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Every time I've ever gotten close to being successful, I've found some way to screw it up.
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I tried to draw and write comics when I was four. By the time I was nine, I had written my first story - about my dog, of course.
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I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.
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I remember going to a theater once, and there was a stairway that wound its way out to the back. And I was very young, a small child, and I said to my mom, 'Why are those people going up those stairs?' And she said, 'You know, I don't know how to tell you this, I don't know how to explain it, but it won't always be that way, because it's wrong.'
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I've done very well financially and sold a lot because I've had a multiple method of attack as a writer. That's a conscious strategy.
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I do better just letting the stories develop. I don't outline very well, and I can't follow it if I do. Once I've outlined it, why write the damn book?
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My parents had become adults during the Great Depression, as had many of my aunts and uncles, so I got stories from all of them. They are fastened up inside me, and now and again, they have to come out.