A Quote by Joe R. Lansdale
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.
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Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
Patience is a part of boxing. After I had missed out on the Olympic gold medal in 1984, a lot of people tried to talk me into turning professional quickly to make money. They told me that the next Olympics in Seoul would be boycotted again, that I was wasting my life, blah blah. But I still had unfinished business. I wanted the gold medal, and I got it in ?88. Only then was I ready to turn professional.
I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.
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.
For me I tried to not keep a low profile but I was training in a different country as I prepared for Sydney because I had such a realistic gold medal shot. I just wanted to stay focused and not get caught up in all of the hullabaloo and all of press prior to it.
The 20-year-old version of me had all this energy, and wanted to be obnoxious with his art and wanted to communicate even though he didn't know what he wanted to communicate.
At just 16 years old, I was told that my back would never be the same again. My well-being had been neglected for the opportunity to win a gold medal.
I believe that one version of the good in life can be defined by the moments I sometimes had playing tennis as a sixteen-year-old. You'd be out on the court and for an hour, two hours, sometimes an entire roasting hot day, and every single thing you hit would go in. Hit that ball as hard as you wanted, wherever you wanted, and it went in.
I was told that there are about 900 gold medal winners in American Olympic history. When I thought about the number 900, I wondered how many kids that are influenced by a gold medal ever get to see a gold medal. What I thought was really neat was that I've already had a couple hundred kids touch my gold medal.
I didn't really want to be an actor when I was growing up - I wanted to be whatever I was reading about or seeing at the time. When I read The Firm I wanted to be a lawyer; when I saw Top Gun, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. So that's why acting probably turned out to be a good thing for me because I get to be people for five minutes or 90 minutes. I'd be curious to see if I had the attention span to be like those guys on 30 Rock and play the same character season after season.
Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.
The thing about Pablo is that he wasn't happy with what he had - just being the sixth richest man in the world. He wanted to be loved. He wanted to be accepted. He wanted to be President of Colombia; he wanted his kids to go to the same school as the Colombian elite. But he wouldn't be accepted by the elite.
I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.
I have tried to write soundtracks, and the main problem with those was that the directors often had in their minds a much stronger sense of what they wanted to hear, than what I was willing to give them, and I guess there was no way to say, "Well why don't you write your scene around my music?" Because that's just cocky and awful.
I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same - they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.
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