Top 50 Joe R. Lansdale Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The logic of a madman is a sane man’s confusion.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

2. “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

3. “Hallowed be thy name, oh Lord – and shotgun do your stuff.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “God is an idea, the devil is us.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

8. “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

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

— Joe R. Lansdale

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

— Joe R. Lansdale

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Don’t try to skin your rabbit and keep it as a pet too.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

15. “Certainly there were gars in there that had bitten children and pulled swimming dogs under for their afternoon meals. They didn’t call the big ones alligator gar for nothing. Six feet long, lean and vicious, they were the barracudas of fresh water, beasts with angry racial memories of lost prehistoric seas. And.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

16. “The heat moved across the morning like an invisible truck, heavy and crushing, and with a hotter engine than the day before.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

17. “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

18. “Everything is humorous,” said Shorty, “except your own death. But other people will laugh.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “We got some beer and some cheap wine and rented a room at a rundown motel and stayed up most of the night telling lies and a few sad truths that we hoped the other would think were lies.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “We broke and ran. The squirrel, however, was not a quitter. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that it was in fact gaining on us, and Leonard’s cussing was having absolutely no effect, other than to perhaps further enrage the animal, who might have had Baptist leanings. We.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

34. “I can’t stand a damn liar and have no respect for one. But an artful exaggerator always gets my full attention and my undying respect. – Nat Love.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

35. “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

36. “Leonard, you’re my hero. When I grow up I want to be just like you. Can I, huh, can I?” “Need some black paint first, but that isn’t gonna make you as pretty. And it would be nice if you were a lot less stupid.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

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

— Joe R. Lansdale

38. “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

39. “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

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

— Joe R. Lansdale

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Some things you do, not because they’re pleasant, but because they have to be done.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

45. “For when you can’t live life, you’re just burning life, sucking air and making turds. Perhaps it’s not age, but health that matters. Live long and healthy, it doesn’t matter. But live long and unhealthy, it’s a living hell. And here I lie. Not doing well at all. Only the past seems to matter now; only it seems to be alive; only it can support my soul.”

— 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. “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

48. “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

49. “Old age and death were as wild and improbable as some drunken story about walking across the face of a star.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

50. “Under the covers we danced the good, slow dance, and she let loose with that laugh I loved so much, the one as sweet and happy as the song of a bird. And I did not care to remember then that even the most predatory of birds, the shrike, can sing.”

— Joe R. Lansdale