J Spillane Quotes & Sayings

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book. — Mickey Spillane

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

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

Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney. — Mickey Spillane

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

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

Critics themselves, they used to tear me up. — Mickey Spillane

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

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

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

Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer. — Mickey Spillane

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

No one likes my books except the public. — Mickey Spillane

I read all the time ... I read a lot of history books. — Mickey Spillane

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

Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am. — Mickey Spillane

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

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

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle. — Mickey Spillane

Mike Hammer drinks beer because I can't spell Cognac. — Mickey Spillane

I try to stay in good physical shape, I don't smoke, I don't drink. — Mickey Spillane

I played in a movie called Ring of Fear with Clyde Beatty and Pat O'Brien. — Mickey Spillane

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

I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends. — Mickey Spillane

If the public likes you, you're good. — Mickey Spillane

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

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

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

I read because the women that I liked when I was a teenager lived down in Greenwich Village and they all had those black clothes. The Jules Feiffer women with the black leather bags and the blonde hair and the silver earrings and they all had read Proust and Kafka and Nietzche. And so when I said, 'No, the only thing I've ever read were two books by Mickey Spillane,' they would look at their watch and I was out. So in order to be able to carry on a conversation with these women who I thought were so beautiful and fascinating, I had to read. So I read. But it wasn't something I did out of love. I did it out of lust. — Woody Allen

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