Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.

You cannot write a book unless it is totally inhabiting your imagination and you are totally engrossed with it. Which is a kind word for obsession.

A writer doesn't write about just anything. He writes about things he has an affinity for.

I write what's given me to write.

I can't speak in too much detail about a book or story I'm working on because I find that it takes the energy out of my writing. When I begin to work, it's like a soda bottle that's been jostled before it's opened. There's a lot of pent up energy in there. I have to let it out slowly, carefully, so that I can turn it into a written work.

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.

I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.

I think writing well takes a little bit of talent and an awful lot of work.

I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed. I don't think my style has changed very much at all - though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Actually, I can't remember when I was not writing.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!

I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up - when am I going to write this, am I going to be able to write this, what is this image about - and I'm thinking about it all the time, but I'm not really inside it, inside the writing.

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.