James Ellroy
I am the most well-adjusted human being I know. I started out this investigation as a very happy man with a great career. I've got the life people dream about: I am rich, I am famous, I've got a fabulous marriage to an absolutely, spell-bindingly brilliant woman.Collection: Famous
I have a very intense marriage.Collection: Marriage
Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.Collection: Politics
I like to be alone so I can write. But focus can hurt you. I don't want to be some stress casualty in early middle age.Collection: Alone
As critical acclaim and response has built up, every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I've created about my work and refine it.
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.
Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.
I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.
I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.
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.
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.
I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.
Every one of my books is written from the viewpoint of cops, with the exception of my book Killer on the Road, which is written from the viewpoint of a serial killer.
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.
My mother and I will continue on some level that I haven't determined yet. I think my mother's 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 want to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their humanity.
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'm clenched down, I'm locked in on it, which is my general approach to life.
I put on such a good show, the story is outrageous, and people don't want to hear that I'm basically a reasonable human being. As long as it continues to get me print, I'll continue to perform in an exuberant manner.
As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.
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.
Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
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 haven't been to a movie in a year and a half.
I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.
Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.Collection: Dog
Some people don’t respond to civility.Collection: People
L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.Collection: Home
Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.Collection: Fierce
I learn things late-and only the hard way.Collection: Way
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.Collection: People
Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.Collection: Tvs
America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.Collection: Regret
Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You're in with the former, but my God I don't envy the blood on your conscience.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Males
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.Collection: Book
It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Dad
I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Book
To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Book
Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?Collection: Confused
I cleaned up. I quit drinking, I quit doing drugs, I quit stealing, I quit breaking into houses, I tried to quit being a bad human being. I developed a conscience later in life than many. I call it the lost-time-regained dynamic.Collection: Drinking
I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Psychology
"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.Collection: War
You're grounded!!!! You can't go out and prowl the L.A. streets. You've got to do something more edifying, emboldening and altogether more groovy. You gots to stay home tonite and read a good book!!!!!!!!!!Collection: Book
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.Collection: Crime Novels