Top 63 Joe R. Lansdale Quotes
#1. But killing a man ought to mean something, even if you have to do it.
Joe R. Lansdale
#2. Over-confidence is the way to give your soul to the devil an inch at a time.
Joe R. Lansdale
#3. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#4. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#5. If this saying did not exist, somebody would have invented it.
Joe R. Lansdale
#6. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#7. All us humans are fouled on both ends. One we shit out of, and the other we talk shit out of.
Joe R. Lansdale
#8. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#9. I trust the sun to rise and the sun to set, though I know one day it will do these things without me.
Joe R. Lansdale
#10. Skittles: the fun,colorful candy to eat, but even funner to throw at old people.
=]
(yes I know funner isn't a word)
Joe R. Lansdale
#11. There's no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than the self-made man. And no one more admirable.
Joe R. Lansdale
#12. He decided quite suddenly, having kept fairly good record on the calendar, that tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and zombies be damned. The Christmas lights were going up.
Joe R. Lansdale
#13. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#14. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#15. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#16. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#17. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#18. Everything is humorous," said Shorty, "except your own death. But other people will laugh.
Joe R. Lansdale
#19. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#20. You want to know what I'm wearing?"
"Not unless you think it'll really get me excited."
"I'm afraid clothes have to have women in them for you to get excited."
"Maybe you could talk in a high voice."
"Cut through the shit, Hap.
Joe R. Lansdale
#21. Let me tell you, if you have never seen an agitated squirrel you have seen very little, nor have you heard much, because the sound of an angry squirrel is not to be forgotten.
Joe R. Lansdale
#22. Don't try to skin your rabbit and keep it as a pet too.
Joe R. Lansdale
#23. the Texas stars shining down like rattlesnake eyes showing in a deep, dark wood.
Joe R. Lansdale
#24. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#25. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#26. Sometimes he felt as if he had stepped into an alternate universe where the old laws of nature and what was right and wrong did not apply.
Joe R. Lansdale
#27. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#28. I thanked him and he asked me if my cape got caught on stuff when I was running and jumping, and I said, Sometimes.
Joe R. Lansdale
#29. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#30. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#31. I would have fought in WW2, so I wasn't a pacifist in the broader sense. I prefer to be a pacifist, but I think there are exceptions and times to defend yourself or your country, but that war wasn't one of them.
Joe R. Lansdale
#33. Hallowed be thy name, oh Lord
and shotgun do your stuff
Joe R. Lansdale
#34. I love Crews, but had been writing a long time before I knew of him. I learned of him because a friend thought we were similar. The reason we are is we were both heavily influenced by Flannery O'Conner. She was wonderful.
Joe R. Lansdale
#35. That's love for you. When it's good, it's magic. When it isn't, it just pees all in your soup.
Joe R. Lansdale
#36. I wouldn't choose conscientious objector and I wouldn't go to Canada. I did what Hap did and almost went to prison. I think the threw me a bone as the war was winding down, and I think they accepted my sincerity for being against that war.
Joe R. Lansdale
#37. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#38. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#41. You need to read some Agatha Christie, man.
Why? Am I being punished?
Joe R. Lansdale
#42. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#43. Deep down I think I may be just like everyone else. And do you know what, Harry?"
"No sir."
"That bothers me.
Joe R. Lansdale
#44. 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?
Joe R. Lansdale
#45. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#46. It's one thing to wave at the Devil from afar, quite another to shake the bastard's hand.
Joe R. Lansdale
#47. Only our memories allow that some people ever existed. That they mattered, or mattered too much.
Joe R. Lansdale
#48. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#49. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#50. They were going to shoot us for five hundred dollars," I said. "Wait." I turned to Limp. "Was that apiece?"
"To split," Limp said.
"Really?" I said.
Limp nodded. "We got some raccoons out of an attic for the same price.
Joe R. Lansdale
#51. I'm not poor now, but unlike some of my friends who are now rich, I haven't embraced conservatism and religion. I'm not opposed to religion if you keep it out of my life.
Joe R. Lansdale
#52. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#53. Some things you do, not because they're pleasant, but because they have to be done.
Joe R. Lansdale
#55. I got something to say to you, big shot."
"Say it, then," I said, "while I'm used to the drone of your voice. I'd rather not get acclimated again.
Joe R. Lansdale
#56. Size and strength didn't intimidate Herman. As he told me later, no matter how big they grow, balls and eyes stay soft and a tire tool has no friends.
Joe R. Lansdale
#57. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#58. Hap, even tough I'm a racist castrating bitch that wants you to be better than you are, wants you to do something with your life besides be a knockabout, do you think you could find it in your heart, in your itty-bitty white man's dick, to get a hard-on for me? In other words, want to fuck?
Joe R. Lansdale
#59. I know the Pollock novel. Read it last year and liked it. Daniel Woodrell is awesome. I especially like the book Winter's Bone, and the film made from it. Larry Brown is terrific, all his work, but for me Joe in particular, also a good film, but a much better novel.
Joe R. Lansdale
#60. Scott Sigler's Infected is a bucking pulp pony that throws you this way and that, and just when you think you've got your balance, that ole pony bucks the other way. All in all, one hell of an exhilarating ride, and highly recommended.
Joe R. Lansdale
#61. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#62. 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.
Joe R. Lansdale
#63. Who ever said keeping the law of the Lord is peaceable work? The devil brings a sword and I bring a sword back to him. It is the will of the Lord and I am his servant.
Joe R. Lansdale
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