Literary Birthday – 9 March – Mickey Spillane

Mickey Spillane was born 9 March 1918, and died 17 July 2006.

Mickey Spillane Writing Quotes

1. I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.
5. I’m a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
6. 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.
7. 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 any more. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.
8. Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.
9. 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.
10. If the public likes you, you’re good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day.

Mickey Spillane was an American author of crime novels, many featuring Mike Hammer. I, the Jury was the first novel in the series. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally.

 by Amanda Patterson

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