A Quote by Joe R. Lansdale

It seems to be the heart of much of my work. I grew up seeing a lot of racism in the South, but I've seen it all over the world. Don't care for it at all. I was poor, so I'm used to the underdog position.
I've found that a lot of successful poker players grew up poor. And I'm convinced that poor people have a risk tolerance that rich people don't have because poor people fundamentally don't value money that much because they're used to not having it.
I grew up in a small segregated steel town 6o miles outside of Cleveland, my parents grew up in the segregated south. As a family we struggled financially, and I grew up in the '60s and '70s where overt racism ruled the day.
Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.
I grew up pretty poor - not poor compared with people in India or Africa who are really poor, but poor enough so that the worry about money really cast a pall over your life a lot of the time.
Although my family is originally from Jamaica, I grew up in a diverse community in south London. As my parents were immigrants they made every effort to integrate and we used to go to a wonderful church where we befriended families from all over the world.
Slavery remained in the Deep South by other names - in prison programs with charges over nothing and eternal debt that threatened every African-American in the South right up through World War II. And that was after killing three-quarters of a million people, destroying cities, and creating hostility that exists to this day over the the Confederate flag and the racism it symbolizes, all brewing out of bitterness over a war that didn't have to happen.
The racism in South Asia is the most specific racism in the world. It's like racism against a slightly different language group. It's like micro-racism.
I grew up in the South Pacific. Basically, my brothers were Guamanian. I spoke words of Guamanian long before I spoke words of English, and so I've seen a lot. You know, I've traveled in places where people don't have the benefits of American life. And so I've seen a lot of stuff.
I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich.
I grew up in the American South, the segregated South. Now we have a black man who is president. It was an age of apartheid, and now that's over. It was an age of two superpowers frozen in a cold war, and now that's resolved. So history marches on, except for this Arab-Israel conflict, which seems to have a claim on being eternal.
I was lucky because I used to live right next to a video-rental store. I used to spend so much time watching films. So I've seen a lot. I used to watch 'Dynasty' and 'Dallas' and have seen every kind of film. I've been influenced by everything I've seen.
I grew up on the lake and spent most of that time outdoors. As a musician, I travel widely around the country and talk to a lot of people, from all walks of life. That experience, combined with my rock and roll roots gives me something of an affinity for the underdog. In many ways, the environment is also the underdog - so, it's an easy fit.
You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.
This was in the '70s and there was a lot of racism towards South Asians and there was a lot of hazing and bullying and racism that really probably shaped me in some way in terms of, like, wanting to get out of there.
I grew up in the south, poor - on rock, dirt roads.
I grew up in a little town called Uckfield, and there's not much to do - so we used to fight a lot. I was never in serious trouble, but we used to have the local bobby round the house saying, 'Rory's been up to this again.'
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