James Ellroy Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Where’s your sketch pad?” I asked. … “I gave that up,” Kay said. “I wasn’t very good, so I changed my major.” “To what?” “To pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history.” “I like a woman who knows what she wants.” Kay smiled. “So do I, but I don’t know any.

Some people don’t respond to civility.

"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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.