Joe R. Lansdale
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.Collection: Diet
If you don't toot your own horn, it goeth untooted.
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.'
Some people see writing as a white-collar career, but I've always approached it as a blue-collar writer.
I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.
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'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.
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.
Sometimes, if I don't write for a day or two, I get backed up - it's like constipation.
People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they're worth reading.
I think I built my reputation by not worrying about it.
I don't plot, and I don't plan. I like to be surprised like the reader.
A lot of friends I went to school with were criminals.
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 there are some people for whom words are like food.
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 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.
I love and respect the West - you can't live in Texas and not do that.
I turned out to be a tough, smart kid.
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.
Ossie Davis is one of my heroes for civil rights and things like that.
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.
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.
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'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.
Texas is as alien as Mars.
I come from a poor family.
I figure I can be artistic, but I work like a blue-collar person, too, and I'm serious about that.
I've never liked the publishing world's determination to pigeonhole every writer into a genre.
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 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.
Every time I've ever gotten close to being successful, I've found some way to screw it up.
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.
Psychologists and psychiatrists send me cards and say, 'Hey, I love your books.'
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.
Twain is my keystone. He reminds me of my people because that's the way they told stories.
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.
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.
The bottom line is, Texas and its people are pretty much what most people mean when they use the broader term 'America.'
I sold my first story when I was 21 in 1973.
People in my town were not that into reading, but the overblown way Texans told stories was important.
When you live in a small town behind the Pine Curtain, you live inside your head a lot.
'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.
My father, he couldn't read or write.
I worked in rose fields, and I worked in potato fields. I did some bouncing.
I never got a degree; I just started writing.
I decided with 'Savage Season' to use a lot of things in my life as the basis.
I've got friends who totally disagree on politics, religion, cultural things, but at the core, we're the same people.
If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.