Mickey Spillane Quotes

The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.

My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.

Through acting and film, I felt that my life had a sense to it. I felt I had a mission.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

I'm a quiet person, and I live a quiet, pleasant, ordinary, simple life.

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

I am not looking for fame. I prefer to have a normal life.

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

I think attempting to make art is a utopian process in itself, definitely. Nothing I do is ever equal to the ideas in my head. You do the best you can, you do it with patience and love, and then you give up. The moment you give up is when you know the book is done.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

I continue to write. It's just one of those things that I do. I'll have periods when I write and periods when I don't. But you don't want it to become a discipline really. If it becomes a discipline, it becomes a chore and that's no good.

An artist's life is supposed to lead toward his masterpiece, not away from it.

That is an artist as I would have an artist be, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art--panemet Circen.

I began to wonder - I knew I was an artist or wanted to be one - but I was wondering whether I really was an artist. I was doing such ordinary things that I could feel the difference. Most people would look at those things and say, 'Well, that's nothing. What did you do that for? That's just a wreck of a car or a wreck of a man. That's nothing. That isn't art.' They don't say that anymore.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

Then little writings and recordings that thankfully continue to come up. I'm in this kind of wonderful, kind of awkward, off-putting, and strange position where there's nothing I want to do more than continue to make music, but the ways that I do things are not in tune with how I can do them commercially.

I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.

All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.

I'm not a painter who's saying, "I want people to see my work when I die; it will be this and that." That's not satisfying to me.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money.

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.