Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

'Lagoon' is an ambitious novel.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

Lewis Robinson's first novel, 'Water Dogs,' is stuffed with snow. Open practically any page of this book, and crystals will shake out.

I never got too specialized but did like the Southern Gothic writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

When I read Daniel Woodrell's novel 'Winter's Bone,' I was drawn to the characters, the setting, and the sound of the dialog.

The Thorn Birds' by Colleen McCullough. I took it on a holiday to Greece and just fell in love with it.

I don't want to dis anybody, but someone like Robert Parker. I first read a Spenser book maybe 20 years ago and then read every one that came out. I did that with Tony Hillerman too.

Well you know I've been fan of Tony Hillerman's books for years.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

I do 30 to 40 books a year, so it's a fair amount of reading. Back and forth between nonfiction and fiction. I usually have three or four things that are open on my desk, on my bed, on audiobook in the car.

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

I'm pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi, working for our white family. It never occurred to us to ask. It was everyday life. It wasn't something people felt compelled to examine. I have wished, for many years, that I'd been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question. She died when I was sixteen. I've spent years imagining what her answer would be. And that is why I wrote this book.

I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you.

Good travel books are novels at heart.

Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.