Mickey Spillane Quotes & Sayings

“If I need something, I'll invent it.”

“If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.”

“Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.”

“Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.”

“Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still... you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.”

“Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am.”

“My father was Catholic, my mother was Protestant, and because of that I got Christened in both churches, so I've got all these names... but my Dad always called me Mick.”

“I'm a country boy. I hate New York. But that's where things happen, so I use it as a base for stories, I know enough about it. But I have to keep going back there.”

“See, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead. Otherwise you don't have a hero. You can't kill a hero. That's why I never let him get older.”

“Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer.”