Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

I'm drawn to that period, the '50s.

I never thought I wanted to write about the '50s, because I thought it was the most boring and bland decade to grow up in, and I never wanted to go back there.

I remember the Washington in which I grew up as a genuine small town. Maybe this is true for everyone, that we all feel that the times in which we grew up were simpler, less complex.

I think that I recall the nostalgic '50s: the start of early television and rock-and-roll, and I think everything seemed to get very generic. Not much has changed.

I get nonplussed by all the Fifties retro-revival aesthetic. Would we really want to be in our pinnies in our kitchen weeping? I find the kitchen, housewifey aesthetic repugnant.

When I was a young kid, girls were taught that their role in life was to get married and have children. It was the 1950s. Those were the rules.

It's funny: I don't feel like I have any particular privileged feeling for the Fifties.

We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the '50s, like 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet' Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood.

I felt like a typical kid growing up, and Lawnside is a nice town with a huge historical significance.

I grew up in Connecticut - it was really charming, but when I was younger, all I wanted was to get out.

When I was growing up in the eighties, there was a real nostalgic streak for the fifties. Look at 'Back to the Future.'

If school days are the happiest days of your life, I'm hanging myself with my skip-rope tonight.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

I live in New York now, and miss France quite a bit. Of course, the reality of living in a small village in the south of France was very different than the fantasy I had of living in France. Over the years I spent there, that fantasy was worn away and I found a more realistic version of France than the one I began with. I wouldn't say the spell ever goes away, but transforms. Now that I understand French culture more intimately, and speak fluent French, I have a different, more solid, relationship to the country.

I think the older you get, you start to break down the myth and you get to the dirt of it - and if you still love the dirt, then I think you should stay on board.

I saw The Sound of Music again recently, and I loved it. Probably it's a more valuable film now than when it first came out, because some of the things it stood for have already disappeared. There's a kind of naive loveliness about it, and love goes by so fast ... love and music and happiness and family, that's what it's all about. I believe in these things. It would be awful not to, wouldn't it?

It's the worst part of seeing old friends: when your rose-colored memories become undone by reality.

Old men are children once again a dream that sways and wavers into the hard light of day.

Dreams age faster than dreamers.

Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.

Wasn't it beautiful when you believed in everything?

You really can't go home again. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, when you try, you find out that home isn't really there anymore... but that it wasn't only in your head before. Home actually existed. Home wasn't just a dream. Sometimes, that's the best thing of all.

The Golden Age was never the present age.

Even when the facts are available, most people seem to prefer the legend, and refuse to believe the truth when it in any way dislodges the myth.

I don't really miss God but I sure miss Santa Claus!