Quotes from Joe R. Lansdale

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

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.

My father was the first person to introduce me to self-defense and martial arts, which I've been doing all my life now.

I have been on a horrible sea cruise. When my wife and I went to Mexico, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands, I was seasick for a lot of the time. I didn't like being trapped on a ship with a bunch of shuffleboarders.

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.'

When you live in a small town behind the Pine Curtain, you live inside your head a lot.

I think I have broken into the mainstream, and I think that may happen in a broader way, but I want to do it on my own terms, not become a standard producer.

I have finally become my own genre, and now that's what publishers want. I have a wonderful publisher now, Mulholland, very innovated, very fine people working there.

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 sold my first story when I was 21 in 1973.

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

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.

It was the kind of talk that made me want to break off a limb and take to whacking her and that bunch of hypocrites across the back of the head.

Robert Bloch taught me about mixing horror and humor.

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.

I work in the mornings almost exclusively.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I've been writing since 1973. I've written nonfiction things of that nature, but I'm probably best known for crime fiction and, to some extent, horror fiction.

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.

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.