Quotes from Joe R. Lansdale

I was starting to feel as if I were getting along in years and the recent ones were angry at me. By the time you're fifty you start to realize just how much of your time on earth you've wasted.

What I'd like to do is give you to some kind of clinic for experimentation," Leonard said. "Something to do with cutting off heads and packing them in ice.

Technically, I'm not stealing anything. Car or pussy. You don't own the car, and the pussy came with a nightcap." "Don't be vulgar.

It meant I spent less time with my aunt, moving through silence like a ship through fog.

I guess. You think he'll get life, or a needle full of shit?" "I pray for the needle. I'd like to be there to push the plunger in the fucker, or maybe just forget the dope and jab him to death with the needle." "The thing that worries me about you, Leonard, is you have such a hard time getting in touch with your true feelings.

I put out the lamp, left Hog snoring, crept outside, and got some air, which was rich and sticky, like a sweaty horse shank, full of the sounds of cicadas and crickets and more than a few bleating frogs.

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.

Psychologists and psychiatrists send me cards and say, 'Hey, I love your books.'

I've never liked the publishing world's determination to pigeonhole every writer into a genre.

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.

People in my town were not that into reading, but the overblown way Texans told stories was important.

Texas is as alien as Mars.

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

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

I'm glad I've had the comic work. I plan to do others, but I could lay it down if I had to choose. I hope I don't have to, though.

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.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

I'm not poor now, but unlike some of my friends who are now rich, I haven't embraced conservatism and religion. I'm not opposed to religion if you keep it out of my life.

Ossie Davis is one of my heroes for civil rights and things like that.

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

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

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.'

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 father always encouraged me to get an education, but he was also a guy that, when he was younger, had ridden the rails from town to town to box and wrestle for money.