138 Quotes by Joe R. Lansdale

The heat moved across the morning like an invisible truck, heavy and crushing, and with a hotter engine than the day before.

We broke and ran. The squirrel, however, was not a quitter. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that it was in fact gaining on us, and Leonard’s cussing was having absolutely no effect, other than to perhaps further enrage the animal, who might have had Baptist leanings. We.

For when you can’t live life, you’re just burning life, sucking air and making turds. Perhaps it’s not age, but health that matters. Live long and healthy, it doesn’t matter. But live long and unhealthy, it’s a living hell. And here I lie. Not doing well at all. Only the past seems to matter now; only it seems to be alive; only it can support my soul.

We got some beer and some cheap wine and rented a room at a rundown motel and stayed up most of the night telling lies and a few sad truths that we hoped the other would think were lies.

It’s one thing to wave at the Devil from afar, quite another to shake the bastard’s hand.

Old age and death were as wild and improbable as some drunken story about walking across the face of a star.

It was the kind of talk that made me want to break off a limb and take to whacking her and that bunch of hypocrites across the back of the head.

I have always felt validated and it shouldn’t take film to do that for writer, but I’m glad it has. My plan has always been to be read more widely by doing just what I’ve always done. I wanted to break into the mainstream without becoming mainstream.

But to lose my idealism, to quit believing in the ability of human beings to rise above their baser instincts, was to become old and bitter and of no service to anyone, not even myself.