Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.

In the past, I was sometimes put in this women's lit category, and I was never really sure that was the appropriate place for me - although I certainly recognize it can be helpful and correct for other people.

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and 'Second Chance' was not an easy novel to define.

My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.

Certainly, there is a tendency to lump women who write similar types of books together, and it's not just in crime, is it? Women's fiction is supposedly a whole genre of itself. There's no male equivalent.

If you call it a romance, it will never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other respectable literary venue. And that's okay. I can live with that.

I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.

Publishers have published women's fiction into a corner, and now we are all trying to punch our way out of it. We just have to write the best books we possibly can and hope that, once the pink covers and Bridget Jones have faded from memory, we might finally be allowed just to be called writers.

Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

I'm sold as a literary writer in Holland; I'm sold as crime fiction in England. I think of it as just literature.

As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit - subliterature.

I don't think any writer chooses what his or her work is called.

I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book.

I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.

I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.

I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly.

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

Calling one thing 'literature' and another 'fiction' is a way to create status where there is none.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

Science fiction is the ugly stepchild of mainstream literature, and fantasy is the ugly stepchild of science fiction, and tie-in novels are the ugly stepchild of fantasy... and on and on and on.