I figure I can be artistic, but I work like a blue-collar person, too, and I'm serious about that.
— Joe R. Lansdale
Texas is as alien as Mars.
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.
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 love and respect the West - you can't live in Texas and not do that.
I write what I hear.
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 think I built my reputation by not worrying about it.
Some people see writing as a white-collar career, but I've always approached it as a blue-collar writer.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
A lot of friends I went to school with were criminals.
People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they're worth reading.
I come from a poor family.
My father was the first person to introduce me to self-defense and martial arts, which I've been doing all my life now.
Ossie Davis is one of my heroes for civil rights and things like that.
I turned out to be a tough, smart kid.
I used to just sit down and read the dictionary, and I read the Bible and Shakespeare from cover to cover.
I think there are some people for whom words are like food.
I don't plot, and I don't plan. I like to be surprised like the reader.
Sometimes, if I don't write for a day or two, I get backed up - it's like constipation.
