Joe R. Lansdale

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

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

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

“I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.”

“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 work in the mornings almost exclusively.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“My dad was born in 1909, my mother in 1914, I believe. Their life experiences were different than younger parents, so I grew up with a different perspective.”

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

“'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.”

“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 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?”

“I think the big thing is that Stephen King is just a phenomenon, and when he came along, for the first time horror was suddenly considered a very commercial genre. It had always been around, of course, but now, the books had the word 'horror' actually printed on their spines.”

“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.”

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

“I turned out to be a tough, smart kid.”