Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.

Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer.

Where I am they can smell out a hurricane. My house survived Hurricane Hazel, but it didn't get past Hugo.

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.

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.

Critics themselves, they used to tear me up.

I know an awful lot of Hollywood people, who are so self-important, I can't understand it.

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 try to stay in good physical shape, I don't smoke, I don't drink.

I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.

If I need something, I'll invent it.

If the public likes you, you're good.

Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am.

Victor Saville was bad news because he wanted money just to do one big picture.

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 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'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 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.