Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

I can't read, I don't know how to write, my whole life has been one big fight.

My mum didn't understand that education was an important thing. She couldn't do my homework with me. I was helping her read stuff. She once brought shaving soap thinking it was whipped cream.

I grew up in an underprivileged home.

Understood what the struggle was about. My mother. Couldn't read or write, but she had more sense than many a graduate from Harvard.

I'm from Brooklyn. I grew up very poor- seven people, four rooms. My dad had no education.

Mum grew up in Wythenshawe, one of 12. My mum didn't really go to school and didn't see the need for education, she got bullied so she excluded herself.

I've got no education.

I grew up in Alabama in a very small town and didn't have access to the finest of anything, really. But my mother was the kind of woman who just wanted us, me and my sisters, to be exposed to any and anything she could find.

It's always a struggle growing up in Akron.

I can read and write. I went to school for six years. I just couldn't continue.

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

There are so many people in the world who cannot read English or French or whatever.

I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.

His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.

In our tribal areas the literacy rate among women is 3%; among men, 17%; and there is no economy.

I know what not being able to read can do to a child's confidence.

I don't know fancy big words, because I didn't have a rich mother who sent her to fancy schools.

I think if a youngster leaves school unable to read you're kind of condemning them to a life of poverty and a life of lack of potential.

My children didn't have my advantages; I was born into abject poverty.

When you come from an under-privileged background, oftentimes, you feel a little overwhelmed by your education or your lack of.

I was born on a council estate with a mum who, despite doing everything she could for me, couldn't help me learn to read and write because she had never been taught herself. As the jargon would have it now, I was not 'school ready.'

I have always worried about who can read, who can't, who doesn't, and the great, life-altering consequences hidden within those distinctions.

I learned reading and writing from my mother.

I love kids, but I also recognize that things could be better for mine.