13 Mickey Spillane Quotes on Writing

Mickey Spillane quotes on writing

33. 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.

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

35. 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.

40. I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.

42. I was the first one probably in writing to use a nickname, Mickey, and it stuck.

44. I don't care what the editor likes or dislikes, I care what the people like.

47. 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.

48. Hemingway hated me. I outsell him and he was steamed. One day he wrote a story for Bluebook berating me. So I'm going on a big TV show in Chicago and I don't get it, that's sour grapes... I mean if you can't say something nice about someone why say anything at all?

50. I don't research anything. If I need something, I'll invent it.

52. I've gotta keep writing. But where's the next step, where do you go? But at my age, you start to get tired. You're not full of piss and vinegar. The vinegar's all gone.

53. I always wanted to have Mike Mazurki play Hammer... too bad he couldn't act.

54. 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.

56. When I started the paperback market, there were only a few good writers, now the market's loaded... you don't know which one to take.