Words matter. These are the best James Ellroy Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn’t move me.
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.
I’m clenched down, I’m locked in on it, which is my general approach to life.
Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.
Anybody who doesn’t know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.
I’m getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.
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.
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.
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 would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
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 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.
Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
I haven’t been to a movie in a year and a half.
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 know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don’t know any criminals.
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.
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.
