Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

I have a good friend who's a Texas girl; Texas girls are a whole different breed.

New Mexico was such a strange place; it was like filming on Mars.

A lot of Texans go up to New York and stay there forever. If there are any two places with more individual characters, I don't know them.

I always had a curiosity about Texas. I had a curiosity about small-town life, although, granted, Odessa's not a tiny town.

Texans are by nature independent people.

But I'm a citizen of Texas and try to spend most of my time there.

If you ain't Texan, I ain't got time for you.

You can take the girl out of Texas but not the Texas out of the girl and ultimately not the girl out of Texas.

I still think probably the only thing I'm suited for is being a boy from Texas.

If you go down to Texas, people are real proud about and they rep Texas.

The bottom line is, Texas and its people are pretty much what most people mean when they use the broader term 'America.'

In Texas, they're very proud of being cowboys. It's a different atmosphere - a lot more agricultural. I can't, living here in Jersey, predict who they are. It's called respecting the community.

All we did was take what we were and brought it forward. We obviously had a great amount of pride in being from Texas.

I come from Texas. We're a different brand of people. You're not changing who I am.

When I was growing up in Texas, I didn't think there was anywhere else to live; that's how we're raised in Texas.

If you've ever driven across Texas, you know how different one area of the state can be from another. Take El Paso. It looks as much like Dallas as I look like Jack Nicklaus

I was raised in the West. The west of Texas. It's pretty close to California. In more ways than Washington, D.C., is close to California.

The American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even in one state, northern and southern California are like two separate countries.

I love New York for being New York. I love L.A. for being L.A. But when it comes home, I'm a Midwest, South type of dude. I like open roads, I like to drive, and it may not be as fast, but it's definitely a place where you get to appreciate a lot more. Not saying that you don't up here, but that's not what I'm accustomed to.

To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it.

I have not got accustomed to English life. The food is truly disastrous and it rains all the time.

If you get a chance to go outside of the country, you start examining where you're from and some of the thought processes. Like when I finally got away from the east coast for a while, and I came back there was just this underlying anger that I never noticed before, because I was born there and just dropped right into it.

A woman is a foreign land.

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop - for convenience, the one hundredth meridian - you have reached the West.

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.