I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.

I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.

I wanted to portray a newly democratized, enclosed society. I wanted to show how extraordinarily fluid people are in their embrace of other human beings.

"War gives men a plain-and-simple something to do ... Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate." It's a romantic manifesto.

When I look at Perfidia, I think, "That's a Pulitzer Prize winner. That's a National Book Award winner." It's not going to get it. It's going to be shelved in crime and it's just the way it is. I've done something that no one else has ever done; I've started out as a mystery writer, a police writer, and a crime writer, and I became something entirely different.

My role relationship to the event will continue to mutate. My relationship to my mother will continue to change as I revise my judgments of her depending on what I learn about her. It goes on. But I feel no less obsessive about my work and no less passionately committed to the life I have now, but I feel poised inside. Which is a good thing to feel at 48.

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."