Top 109 Quotes & Sayings by Joe R. Lansdale

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

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.

I think there are some people for whom words are like food.

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

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

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 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 never got a degree; I just started writing.

I worked in rose fields, and I worked in potato fields. I did some bouncing.

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.

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

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.

I work in the mornings almost exclusively.

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

I turned out to be a tough, smart kid.

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

My father, he couldn't read or write.

I was well under the spell of the old Gold Medal Crime novels when I wrote 'Savage Season,' and I wanted to write a modern version of that. I had tried the same thing with 'Cold in July,' and I wanted to give it another go.

I write what I hear.

Every time I've ever gotten close to being successful, I've found some way to screw it up.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.'

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.'

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.

I sold my first story when I was 21 in 1973.

Some people see writing as a white-collar career, but I've always approached it as a blue-collar writer.

Texas is as alien as Mars.

Robert Bloch taught me about mixing horror and humor.

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

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

If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.

I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.

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

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.

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

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

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

Sometimes, if I don't write for a day or two, I get backed up - it's like constipation.

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

'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.

In some ways, I don't consider a single Hap and Leonard novel the best, but I consider them my best characters.

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

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.

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.

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.

I come from a poor family.

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 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.

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 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?

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.

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