James Ellroy Quotes

๐Ÿ’ฌ Quotes ๐Ÿ“š Quote Topics โœ’๏ธ Quotes' Authors ๐Ÿ“… Daily Dose of Quotes

Joe Wambaugh's a friend. I know him only casually, but I like him a lot. I think he likes my books.

James Ellroy

I'm way past the idea of using ideology or political view as a gauge of human character. I simply don't believe it. And many people, I tend to think most people, feel that way. Since I don't have to worry about it, I'm happy.

James Ellroy

Periodically I just notch up. And everyone among my colleagues thinks that Perfidia - in its accessibility, its big throbbing heart - will be the biggest notch up yet. We'll see what happens. It's on my ass.

James Ellroy

If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.

James Ellroy

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.

James Ellroy

Whereโ€™s your sketch pad?โ€ I asked. โ€ฆ โ€œI gave that up,โ€ Kay said. โ€œI wasnโ€™t very good, so I changed my major.โ€ โ€œTo what?โ€ โ€œTo pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history.โ€ โ€œI like a woman who knows what she wants.โ€ Kay smiled. โ€œSo do I, but I donโ€™t know any.

James Ellroy

Some people donโ€™t respond to civility.

James Ellroy

"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.

James Ellroy

I always cringe when a male friend of mine, who's very fixated on women, puts "compatibility" at the top of his list of attributes that he would be looking for in a woman. I would replace compatibility with dialectic.

James Ellroy

Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.

James Ellroy

Anything less than total candor was bullshit. I owed that to my readers, I owed that to myself, and I owed that most specifically to my mother. I've had some thrilling moments in my 18-year literary career to this point, and nothing comes close to giving Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, the farm girl from Tunnel City, Wisconsin, to the world.

James Ellroy

I was in L.A. in '08. It was a cold Saturday night. I had spread my phone number out to a score of women and was just indulging this sweet, sad, elegiac, bale loneliness - don't tell me you haven't been there.

James Ellroy

The 1950s to me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behind most doors waiting to creep out. The 1950s to most people is kitsch and Mickey Mouse watches and all this intolerable stuff.

James Ellroy

Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

James Ellroy

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

James Ellroy

As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.

James Ellroy

In the time just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Perfidia opens, we were pre-psychologized. There were no concepts of identity, no politics of victimization. Reparation wasn't in the language. Nobody thought about giving the great grandchildren of black slaves so much as $1.98. And all of a sudden the bombs hit, interventionism versus isolationism became a dead issue, and it was us-versus-them in a heartbeat.

James Ellroy

It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one.

James Ellroy

And you love to read, you love to escape, right?

James Ellroy

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

James Ellroy

The truth of the matter is, you lose a parent to murder when you're 10 years old, and in fact at the time of the murder you hate your lost parent, my mother in my case.

James Ellroy

I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.

James Ellroy

I work within the framework of a very concerted, purely driven Protestant Christian mindset. I had dark early circumstances. I went inward. I have a sturdy will. I have a big heart. I'm a decent guy. And I have a great gift. It's blunted me to the world in many ways.

James Ellroy

The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's the combination of that meticulousness and the power of the prose and, I think, the depth of the characterizations and the risks that I've taken with language that give the books their clout. And that's where I get pissed off at a lot of my younger readers.

James Ellroy

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.

James Ellroy

I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would rather err on the side of too much authority than too little.

James Ellroy

We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.

James Ellroy

Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?

James Ellroy

Well, the clues are there. They always are. Which is why when crimes are solved decades after the fact, it's obvious that the clues had always been right in front of them. A traffic ticket in Brooklyn is how they got ["Son of Sam" serial killer] David Berkowitz. You've just got to look.

James Ellroy

Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.

James Ellroy

For a much lauded writer, I'm not terribly self-absorbed. In social situations, which are difficult for me - I mean, this is an interview - I'm normally uncomfortable talking about myself.

James Ellroy

It's all sex for me. Politics is sex. Race is sex. It's the novel. It's the novel!

James Ellroy

I like to have fun out there. I work hard, and then I get to cut loose and go out and tour, and I enjoy it. I like to go out and meet the people. I love to sell books.

James Ellroy

I don't think I will write anything that could be even remotely considered a genre novel from this point on. I think I've graduated.

James Ellroy

I have insane curiosity as to what happened in all these events. I will never know. I'm not a researcher. I don't possess that kind of mind. I have a researcher who compiles the fact sheets and chronologies that allow me to write these big books of mine.

James Ellroy

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

James Ellroy

I don't feel in any way obligated to remain current with the culture. I feel no social obligation whatsoever. I trust my morality in the narrow path I trek through the world as I work.

James Ellroy

The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers.

James Ellroy

I've created a narrative of the world. I live in the world - tenuously, most times. I've avoided the digital world.

James Ellroy

I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.

James Ellroy

I'm not interested in popular culture. I hate Quentin Tarantino. I rarely go to movies. I hate rock 'n' roll. I work. I think. I listen to classical music. I brood. I like sports cars.

James Ellroy

[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people.

James Ellroy

I drank, I used drugs, I broke into houses, sniffed women's undergarments. I ate Benzedrex inhalers, jacked off for 18 hours at a pop, lived with my dad in a shitpad.

James Ellroy

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

James Ellroy

And the only forms of socialism in the world that were then getting results - malign ones, as it was - were the Fascist and Soviet republics. Fascism is a form of socialism - you rebuild the country, you find a scapegoat, and you go from there.

James Ellroy

Classical music fulfills for me the function of narrative. I spend 90 minutes a day listening to symphonic music - Beethoven to Bartรณk - some chamber pieces, and that's my enrichment.

James Ellroy

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

James Ellroy

You try to learn who you are. You work hard. You've either got it or you don't when it comes to writing books. And you tend to only get these things if you want them, and want them to the exclusion of everything else.

James Ellroy
ยซ PrevPage 2Next ยป
HomeX
๐Ÿ˜ All
๐Ÿ˜œ Quizzesโ–ผ
โ“ One Question Quiz
๐ŸŽฌ TV and Movies
๐ŸŽฎ Video Games
๐Ÿคฉ Personality
๐Ÿ’š Relationship
๐Ÿ”ฎ Zodiac
๐Ÿ‘ป Supernatural
โš–๏ธ Would You Rather
๐Ÿพ Animals
โœจ Lifestyle
๐Ÿ‘  Fashion
๐Ÿ” Food and Beverage
๐ŸŽต Music
๐Ÿ“š Books
๐Ÿ’ฌ Comic Books
โญ Celebrities
๐Ÿ–ฅ Technology
๐ŸŽ“ Trivia Quizzesโ–ผ
๐Ÿซ Back to School
๐ŸŽฎ Video Games
๐ŸŽฌ TV and Movies
๐ŸŒŽ Geography
๐ŸŽต Music
๐Ÿฟ Pop Culture
๐Ÿพ Animals
โญ Celebrities
๐Ÿ” Food and Beverage
โœจ Lifestyle
๐Ÿ–ฅ Technology
๐Ÿ”ค Word Questsโ–ผ
๐ŸŽฌ TV and Movies
๐ŸŽฎ Video Games
๐Ÿฟ Pop Culture
๐Ÿซ Back to School
๐Ÿ‘  Fashion
โญ Celebrities
๐Ÿ“š Books
๐Ÿพ Animals
๐Ÿ‘ป Supernatural
๐ŸŒŽ Geography
โœจ Lifestyle
๐Ÿ” Food and Beverage
๐ŸŽต Music
๐Ÿงท Pair itโ–ผ
๐Ÿ“œ Articlesโ–ผ
๐Ÿ•ฏ๏ธ The Mystic Realm
๐Ÿงฌ Curious Minds Only
๐Ÿ’š Relationship
๐Ÿ›ค๏ธ The Decision Mirror
๐ŸŽฌ TV and Movies
๐Ÿค— Feel-Good Factory
๐Ÿ”ฎ Astrology
โœ๏ธ Echoes of Imagination
๐Ÿ•ฐ๏ธ Timeless Etiquette Essentials
๐Ÿ‘ป Supernatural
๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿณ The Rogue Chef
๐Ÿ” Food and Beverage
๐Ÿคญ Gigglesโ–ผ
๐Ÿ—“๏ธ Daily Dose of Giggles
๐ŸŽฒ Pick a Giggle
๐Ÿ’ฌ Quotesโ–ผ
๐Ÿ“š Quote Topics
โœ’๏ธ Quotes' Authors
๐Ÿ“… Daily Dose of Quotes
โ–ถ Videoโ–ผ
๐ŸŽฎ Video Games
๐Ÿฟ Pop Culture
๐Ÿซ Back to School
๐ŸŽฌ TV and Movies
๐ŸŽต Music
๐Ÿ” Food and Beverage
๐ŸŒŽ Geography
๐Ÿ’คDream Interpretation
 
Our Socials
Top Picks
Only 5% of People Can Spell All These Words Correctly One Hit Wonders: Can You Match the Song to the Artist? (VIDEO TRIVIA QUIZ) Accessorizing with Class: Menโ€™s Guide to Formal Accessories Which "The Office" Character's Desk Would Be Yours? Which Book Character Are You Most Like?
Links
Privacy Terms Disclaimer Cookies Contact Us

More from Our Family

Nasame.com / BelowClouds.com

LifeShouts.com ยฉ 2020

The content of LifeShouts.com is protected by the Copyright and Related Rights Act. No part of it may be used, reproduced, recorded or transmitted in any form without the written consent of the owners.