“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.”
“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.”
“Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.”
“I try to stay in good physical shape, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink.”
“Victor Saville was bad news because he wanted money just to do one big picture.”
“Where I am they can smell out a hurricane. My house survived Hurricane Hazel, but it didn’t get past Hugo.”
“I know an awful lot of Hollywood people, who are so self-important, I can’t understand it.”
“Critics themselves, they used to tear me up.”
“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.”
“I played in a movie called Ring of Fear with Clyde Beatty and Pat O’Brien.”
“I read all the time… I read a lot of history books.”
“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.”
“I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If I need something, I’ll invent it.”
“If the public likes you, you’re good.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Now I’m not an author, I’m a writer, that’s all I am.”
“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.”
“Stephen King. Now I’m not crazy about him, but he’s a great a writer.”
“I’m a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.”
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