Mickey Spillane

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

“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.”

“Critics themselves, they used to tear me up.”

“Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.”

“I read all the time... I read a lot of history books.”

“I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.”

“I played in a movie called Ring of Fear with Clyde Beatty and Pat O'Brien.”

“I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why... I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of.”

“Imagine this guy hits Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger and knocks him out. You hit Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger, he'll beat the crap out of you.”

“Where I am they can smell out a hurricane. My house survived Hurricane Hazel, but it didn't get past Hugo.”

“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 know an awful lot of Hollywood people, who are so self-important, I can't understand it.”

“Victor Saville was bad news because he wanted money just to do one big picture.”

“I try to stay in good physical shape, I don't smoke, I don't drink.”

“Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.”