Top 33 Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

I love and respect the West – you can’t live in Texas and not do that.

When I wrote ‘Savage Season,’ it was three years later before I wrote the second Hap and Leonard novel. Whenever I wrote one, I never intended to write the next one.

I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.

I write what I hear.

I used to just sit down and read the dictionary, and I read the Bible and Shakespeare from cover to cover.

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.

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.

I think I built my reputation by not worrying about it.

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?

I figure I can be artistic, but I work like a blue-collar person, too, and I’m serious about that.

The bottom line is, Texas and its people are pretty much what most people mean when they use the broader term ‘America.’

‘Night They Missed the Horror Show’ is my signature story. It changed my life, so it remains my favorite.

If you don’t toot your own horn, it goeth untooted.

The Aryan Nation, the Klan, all these anti-immigrant groups – they’ve never really disappeared, and if you think they have, then you’ve been living in a bubble.

Twain is my keystone. He reminds me of my people because that’s the way they told stories.

I decided with ‘Savage Season’ to use a lot of things in my life as the basis.

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.

A lot of friends I went to school with were criminals.

Robert Bloch taught me about mixing horror and humor.

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.

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.

‘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.

People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they’re worth reading.

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.

I don’t plot, and I don’t plan. I like to be surprised like the reader.

I’ve got friends who totally disagree on politics, religion, cultural things, but at the core, we’re the same people.

Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me pace and gave me a sense of action and adventure.

My mother wanted me to be a reader. She was a reader. Even though she had an 11th-grade education, she was curious about all kinds of things – archeology, anthropology.

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.

If I could take you back in time to the fifties and walk you around to some of the places where I grew up, you’d be trying to get back in your time machine. It wasn’t all sock hops – matter of fact, I never saw a sock hop.

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.

I work in the mornings almost exclusively.

The Westerns have probably affected me more than any one thing, Western-related material. I love Westerns.