Mickey Spillane Quotes

When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness

When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness.

There are heroes and then there are legends, heroes get remembered but legends never die.

When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it's like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity.

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.

I am aware of the words 'national treasure' being attached to me occasionally. It just makes me feel old.

I think that we want to believe in Superman.

I don't really know what it is about vampires that makes them such a powerful symbol, metaphor, whatever in people's consciousness. But I do know they're tremendously powerful. I mean, there's a vampire on 'Sesame Street.' And Count Chocula. I don't know why it's so powerful.

I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.

Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn't really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously.

Who tracks the steps of glory to the grave?

I'm lucky. Usually you're dead to get your own museum, but I'm still alive to see mine.

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

Movie stars and singers never fully pass away because their images are replayed on film and recordings, over and over.

Americans have a profound longing for heroes - now perhaps more than ever. We need our explorers, our sports icons, our Medal of Freedom winners, our Nobel laureates. We need our Greatest Generation warriors, our 'Sully' Sullenbergers, our Neil Armstrongs. On some level, we still subscribe to the myth of the man in the white hat.

I appear to be drawn to iconic characters and what they reflect back to our cultures.

A lot of people... kind of make heroes that are separate from us, people who are, you know, like... John Wayne and Errol Flynn and, you know, Denzel Washington... people who are different, who are larger than life.

Audiences aren't going to get rid of me. One thing I can say, with absolute certainty, is that my shows will still be performed when I'm dead, buried and forgotten. They're going to absolutely outlive me, which is a wonderful thing to think about.

Somewhere in our cultural subconscious, we crave these figures that are big and strong and unassailable, like masculine fortresses. It's like how the 9/11 firemen were venerated.

Elvis' songs will always be there, and I hope mine will be after I'm gone.

Classical heroes are usually much larger than life. They're not quite human beings. They're somehow larger than human scale.

I wanted to be Samson or Hercules from the age of six.

I just hope that my films will survive me.

Everybody loves superheroes, and so to be associated with a superhero forever is just kind of like, that's where the goalposts are. That's kind of, 'Bam, you're immortalized!'

You don't create legends out of other legends.