Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

I didn't write this song. Someone was talking in a room. I just wrote down everything they said.

Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.

You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

I want to be remembered as a storyteller more than someone who had something meaningful to say.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

I write stories that are already in the air, and I think it's important to have the correct listening device to tune in to that frequency.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.

There is no right or wrong way to tell a story. You have to find your own way. You can get your idea from listening, looking, or imagining. Stories are everywhere. All you have to do is pay attention.

It has gone past me now, the writing phase.

Each day I feel a little differently; some times I try to write something that's fictitious and then there's other times where I try to write something that's true.

Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.

Every kid has a story to tell!

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

I don't write about the same thing every time, everyday, different things are happening out there and if you take the time to look around, you can see that, then you can put it all together and tell the story.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.