I'm trying to be less bombastic. I love my books. I think I've done things nobody else has done.

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored.

You get up in the morning because you might meet a woman. And if you stay at home by yourself, alone, you will not meet a woman.

I don't think I came out of anybody. I think I developed out of the influences I described in My Dark Places. American history, L.A. of the 1950s. I'm comfortable with that.

My mother and I will continue on some level that I havent determined yet. I think my mothers a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career.

There are a lot of Ellroy lifts, man. This guy went to school. But then there's a willful thing that comes over me - God gives it to me - where I go, "That's real nice, let's just go home, pat yourself on the back, good dog, good dog, and wake up in the morning and go to work."

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.