Spillane Quotes

#1. I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Flannery O'Connor

#2. And if we're talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

Nic Pizzolatto

#3. I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

Frank Miller

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

Mickey Spillane

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

Mickey Spillane

#6. 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.

Mickey Spillane

#7. 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.

Mickey Spillane

#8. 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.

Mickey Spillane

#9. I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics.

Mickey Spillane

#10. The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

#11. 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.

Mickey Spillane

#12. I don't like people. I don't like any kind of people. When you get them together in a big lump they all get nasty and dirty and full of trouble. So I don't like people including you. That's what a misanthropist is.

Mickey Spillane

#13. It was easy,' I said.

Mickey Spillane

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

Mickey Spillane

#15. Inspiration is an empty bank account.

Mickey Spillane

#16. Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.

Mickey Spillane

#17. I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.

Mickey Spillane

#18. I'm actually a softie. Tough guys get killed too early ... I've got a full head of hair and don't wear eyeglasses.

Mickey Spillane

#19. Critics themselves, they used to tear me up.

Mickey Spillane

#20. The first page sells this book. The last page sells your next book.

Mickey Spillane

#21. I read all the time ... I read a lot of history books.

Mickey Spillane

#22. 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.

Mickey Spillane

#23. If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day.

Mickey Spillane

#24. I had gotten a taste for death and found it palatable to the extent that I could never again eat the fruits of a normal civilization.

Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins

#25. I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead ...

Mickey Spillane

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

Mickey Spillane

#27. Guys like you can't escape the city. Hell, you a got a blood contract with this place. You're married to the old girl.

Mickey Spillane

#28. 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.

Mickey Spillane

#29. I dont like any of them, because they don't read the books. In Kiss Me Deadly my story is better than his story. Anthony Quinn played in The Lond Wait and he didn't read the book either.

Mickey Spillane

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

Mickey Spillane

#31. If the public likes you, you're good.

Mickey Spillane

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

Mickey Spillane

#33. 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.

Mickey Spillane

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

Mickey Spillane

#35. I try to stay in good physical shape, I don't smoke, I don't drink.

Mickey Spillane

#36. Mike Hammer drinks beer because I can't spell Cognac.

Mickey Spillane

#37. Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

Mickey Spillane

#38. I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.

Mickey Spillane

#39. No one likes my books except the public.

Mickey Spillane

#40. Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am.

Mickey Spillane

#41. 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.

Mickey Spillane