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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.

— Mickey Spillane Crime Time interview (2001)

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More quotes by Mickey Spillane

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

The Making of a Bestseller: From Author to Reader (1999)

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.

We brought a man back who should have died long ago. The present can't stand a man like that anymore. Now they want indecision and compromise and reluctance and fear.

The Snake (1964)

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.

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

Crime Time interview (2001)

All Mickey Spillane quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mickey Spillane (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.