Joe R. Lansdale

If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.

Robert Bloch taught me about mixing horror and humor.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me pace and gave me a sense of action and adventure.

'Night They Missed the Horror Show' is my signature story. It changed my life, so it remains my favorite.

I work in the mornings almost exclusively.

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 have been on a horrible sea cruise. When my wife and I went to Mexico, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands, I was seasick for a lot of the time. I didn't like being trapped on a ship with a bunch of shuffleboarders.

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.

In some ways, I don't consider a single Hap and Leonard novel the best, but I consider them my best characters.

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.

I've got friends who totally disagree on politics, religion, cultural things, but at the core, we're the same people.

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

I never got a degree; I just started writing.

I worked in rose fields, and I worked in potato fields. I did some bouncing.

My father, he couldn't read or write.

'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.

When you live in a small town behind the Pine Curtain, you live inside your head a lot.

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

'The Bottoms' or 'A Fine Dark Line' are two of my favorites.

I've always felt that if you pay your bills and can take care of yourself without too much stress, then it's a pretty damn good life.

I lived below the poverty line when I was young and starting out as a writer. But my wife and I kept trying to do things better, as anyone with ambition does. But just because you're trying doesn't mean you're always going to succeed.

The Westerns have probably affected me more than any one thing, Western-related material. I love Westerns.

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'm glad I've had the comic work. I plan to do others, but I could lay it down if I had to choose. I hope I don't have to, though.

I've been writing since 1973. I've written nonfiction things of that nature, but I'm probably best known for crime fiction and, to some extent, horror fiction.

I started writing when I was 9. My mother told me it was before that, but that was the first I remember.

I come from blue collar. I'm very working class.

I sold my first story when I was 21 in 1973.

I didn't read Western novels much until I was in my twenties, but I had a diet of them on film and TV, as well as other things, of course.

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.

My grandmother on my mother's side lived to nearly 100 years old, and she had seen Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as a little girl and had come to Texas by covered wagon.

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 remember going to a theater once, and there was a stairway that wound its way out to the back. And I was very young, a small child, and I said to my mom, 'Why are those people going up those stairs?' And she said, 'You know, I don't know how to tell you this, I don't know how to explain it, but it won't always be that way, because it's wrong.'

I never felt poor. Our family euphemism was that we were broke, which I think psychologically gave you a different feeling. There were people far worse than we were.

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 always disliked that anytime you had gays represented in - and there were some exceptions, certainly - but represented in popular fiction, they were usually the goofy neighbor next door, you know? And I just thought, 'Well, I know a lot of gay people, and they're just as varied as the heterosexual people I know.'

I write what I hear.

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 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.

Ossie Davis is one of my heroes for civil rights and things like 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.'

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 turned out to be a tough, smart kid.

I love and respect the West - you can't live in Texas and not do that.

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.

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

My father was the first person to introduce me to self-defense and martial arts, which I've been doing all my life now.

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.

I think there are some people for whom words are like food.