Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.

In polite society what you say to an attractive woman who is dressed in a way that makes you understand the power of biology is, "You look nice.

I trust the sun to rise and the sun to set, though I know one day it will do these things without me.

I thanked him and he asked me if my cape got caught on stuff when I was running and jumping, and I said, Sometimes.

But to lose my idealism, to quit believing in the ability of human beings to rise above their baser instincts, was to become old and bitter and of no service to anyone, not even myself.

It's one thing to wave at the Devil from afar, quite another to shake the bastard's hand.

The reviews on it, and the new novel, Honky Tonk Samurai have been awesome, though I'm of the school if you believe the good ones you got to believe the bad ones, it's been mostly good ones. The previewers seem to be very happy and excited about it. I know I am. There are plans to continue if it does well.

Some things you do, not because they're pleasant, but because they have to be done.

Hallowed be thy name, oh Lord
and shotgun do your stuff

I get the whole lost-your-parents thing. Been there. But that don't have to turn you stupid. That's a choice, like wearing green stretch pants.

I like ambition. I like someone who gets up in the morning and has a purpose. A real purpose. I have one. I want whoever I love to have one."
"I always look forward to breakfast.

Deep down I think I may be just like everyone else. And do you know what, Harry?"
"No sir."
"That bothers me.

First, there has been a lot of interest in The Drive-in, but, alas, it hasn't actually come to fruition. Maybe soon. Don really got Bubba and I didn't think it could be a film. I thought it was too odd to make it to film. He asked me to do the screenplay, but I declined. I didn't see that it could be a screenplay but he wrote one and proved me wrong. He was always considerate about what I thought about the film and the story's presentation, but in the end, he's the director and he had to make decisions. All good ones.

We couldn't get it off the ground as a film, but then we begin to think television, and Lowell pushed it out there and Jim and Nick were anxious to do Hap and Leonard anyway, and I had worked with them before, so it was a perfect story. I love the series. I hope there's a second.

The sun, like a boil on the bright blue ass of day, rolled gradually forward and spread its legs wide to reveal the pubic thatch of night, a hairy darkness in which stars crawled like lice, and the moon crabbed slowly upward like an albino dog tick striving for the anal gulch.

The problem, kid," Shorty said, "is there is no one on either side of the fence keeping measurements about what you do. God is an idea, and the devil is us.

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.

Shit, I could jerk you up from there, pop you like a whip. Pop you so hard your snatch will snap off and smack the wall."

"So," Vanilla said. "How was charm school?

Only our memories allow that some people ever existed. That they mattered, or mattered too much.

There's no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than the self-made man. And no one more admirable.

Don't try to skin your rabbit and keep it as a pet too.

Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis are just great in that, and Don's direction is sublime. Love it, and I was glad to be a part of it, if just in spirit and Don's desire for it to be a good film and for me to be happy with it. When I first saw it I was very impressed, and it gets better with repeat viewings.

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'm so bored I could sing to my dick.

They might have been all-right people doing the best they could, but I got to tell you, you got a dead cat lying in your yard you ought to bury it. That's my motto.

I love Hap and Leonard and plan to write more about them, but not exclusively about them. I have always worked in film, or since the eighties, but my screenplays - though I got paid and did screenplays for Ridley Scott and John Irvin and Mark Romanek - seldom got made.

Yeah, things are better for blacks and women and gays, but it was the blacks and women and gays that did it, not fuck-ups like this bunch. Whites and straights came along to give help, all right, after the blacks said 'enough' and got their heads busted, and it's the same for the gays and the women. The whites and straights, they control things, and they could have changed it anytime.

I had no idea Savage Season was the beginning of a series. I wrote the second one about three years later. The character of Hap wouldn't stop talking to me, and then there was a third, and over the years nine novels and a collection of stories and some uncollected stories.

Aren't you embarrassed undressing in front of a queer?" Leonard said. "All you know, I might be sizing up your butthole."
"Just call me a tease.

I thought I had the world by the tail. It took me a few years to realize the closest I was to having the world by the tail was being a dingle berry on one of its ass hairs.

You're brooding, Leonard, my friend. What's the problem?"
"I blew it with Fitzgerald."
"I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit. It was more like a nuclear disaster.

That first loving kiss, the one that comes out of you from the source of your personal river, and the one that comes from her that is the same, there's never another moment like it; never another flame that burns so hot. It can never be that good again, ever. All manner of goodness can come after, but it's different. And that's a good thing, because if we burned that hot for too long, we'd be nothing but ash.

I wrote for television some, animation. Batman the Animated Series, Superman the Animated Series, Son of Batman, things of that nature were made and I'm happy about that, but now the recent film and TV stuff have validated me, as if that makes any sense.

I could always write in a wide variety. My moods change same as reader's moods change. I really do love writing the historicals, however, but if that's all I did I would go crazy, same with any of the other kinds of books. I need variety.

Run everything on a generator," Haskel said. "Got to keep it a certain temperature for the stuff I carry. Not too cold. Not too hot. There's shit in here, weather got wrong, it'd go off and blow our asses all the way to Mineola. Maybe out in the goddamned Gulf."
"I don't like to travel that far unless I got plane tickets and a steward in my lap," Leonard said.
Haskel cut an eye toward Leonard. "You mean stewardess, don't you?"
"I don't think so," Leonard said, and let Haskel churn that one over.

First, there are some of my readers who only read Hap and Leonard, not the other stuff, and some who don't read Hap and Leonard, but a large percentage are crossover readers. And yes, I did refuse to go to Vietnam and it looked like prison was in my future, but they sent me to the psychiatrist and he gave me a 1-Y, which is unfit for military service essentially.

You need to read some Agatha Christie, man.
Why? Am I being punished?

I took what worked for me and found I had a system that others were interested in and seemed to work for a wide number of people. It was recognised by other martial artists, grandmasters and such, and they gave me the recognition. I'm proud of my work in martial arts. I still teach but only once a week in a private class, and I train a couple more days a week.

Jim Bob looked at his watch.
"I got time to get there and shower up, put on some smell-good, buy a couple packs of rubbers, and meet my barrel racer."
"Couple packs of rubbers," Brett said. "Very romantic."
"Ah, honey, I'm taking her to dinner first, and I always let the woman put the rubber on, and I think two packs is enough. And don't worry. I need an extra pack, I can send her to the drugstore. I got a bicycle in the garage.

No system is better than another, but some are better for certain people. The person makes a system worthwhile, not the other way around. I blended a lot of systems I had studied over the years, Judo, wrestling, boxing, Hapkido, Kenpo, Thai Boxing, American Kickboxing, Jujitsu, Aikido.

the Texas stars shining down like rattlesnake eyes showing in a deep, dark wood.

Enjoy it if you do, but don't tell me how to live or teach it in school, or not allow a woman the right to choose, and so on. Yeah, all of that slips into my work. I even got a death threat the other day for not being pro gun, which just proves my point. They can kiss my ass.

I have always felt validated and it shouldn't take film to do that for writer, but I'm glad it has. My plan has always been to be read more widely by doing just what I've always done. I wanted to break into the mainstream without becoming mainstream.

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.

You paying good money?"

"For what?"

"Information, asshole. You was the one said it."

"Depends on the information. But please, I had asshole legally dropped from my name.

"That was a mistake.

I'm going to say my name is Dorothy Sherman and I'm telling it like it is. I'm going to say my friends call me Dot, and I prefer my enemies not to call me at all.

Far as I knew, closest she'd gotten to art was a drafting table and dressing mannequins in store windows, and the closest I'd gotten to saving the world was my name on some petitions, for everything from recycling aluminum cans to saving the whales. I put my cans in the trash now, and I didn't know how the whales we're doing.

A day without the sun is like you know, night

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.

The logic of a madman is a sane man's confusion.

Over-confidence is the way to give your soul to the devil an inch at a time.

Ever notice how Christians quote the Old Testament more then the New Testament? That's so they can say mean things, talk bad about the queers and such. New Testament, that's the Christian book. The stuff in red, that's Jesus talk. That's what they're supposed to live their life by, but, no, they like the God of the Old Testament, the mean, judgmental one, before he was on Zoloft.

But killing a man ought to mean something, even if you have to do it.