Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

I've always kind of lived in my own world.

I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina, weird and pudgy, without too many other kids to play with. I spent a lot of time watching TV. It was my reassurance that the outside world was bigger and more colorful than the one I lived in.

I'm lonely I'll make me a world.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

That was one of the reasons I became a writer - I never really had that many friends. I would read a lot, and listen to music. And that was my life.

Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.

I always wanted to live alone for a month in a lakeside cabin. In my fantasy, I enter a state of perfect peace and grow my own kale and stuff, but in real life, I think I might be very bored after four days.

I come from a very, very small town. There were no other actors around. I never met any actors. A lot of those times when I'd be out in the sheds with my dad, I'd step outside, and there's just nothing out there but thousands of acres, forty thousand sheep, and miles of nothing. And so my mind would just wonder about what else was out there.

I played a lot of dress-up in my room. I really liked being alone. I had a lot of friends, but I had an only-child, live-in-my-head personality.

I spent a lot of time in my head, but not like caring about what everybody else thought, just literally in my own world.

I would go home and be this insular girl who listened to music and brooded in her bedroom.

I spent my whole childhood trying to find places to be on my own. I used to sit on the water tank in the attic or in the dog's kennel. I was quite a strange child.

I used to lock myself in my room and memorize scenes from films and reenact them when I was alone.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.

Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence. Yet why these glorious sunsets, I ask myself, if nature does not speak to us with tongues of fire.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

I've led a very isolated existence since I was 6 years old. It's kind of been me and my mind.

Because some of my at-home life was rough and lonely, I often looked to escape into my imagination. Science fiction provided a deep well to pull from and was something easily accessible to me.