Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by James Ellroy
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer James Ellroy.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I want to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their humanity.
I'm clenched down, I'm locked in on it, which is my general approach to life.
I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.
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've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.
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.
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 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.
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.
Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.
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.
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 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.
Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
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 don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.
I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.
As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.
I have a very intense marriage.
I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.
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 haven't been to a movie in a year and a half.
I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.
My guys are morally weak, and they reach toward a tenuous knowledge of self-sacrifice, and sometimes it's too late. I find that moving. It's not a life I'd want to live. But, then, I'm not completely my books.
L.A. ispolluted. It's overpopulated. But it is very much home. It was inevitable for me, the moving back. I was living in San Francisco, and Joan broke it off with me, and I needed a place to live. I'd been divorced. And I needed to write movies and TV shows to earn a living. Alimony. All that. So I figured what the hell, I'll go back to L.A.
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 don't want to recover from writing this book [The Onion]. I feel very poised. I feel like I'm with my mother for the first time ever. I feel like I've confronted her, and the confrontation goes on.
I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.
L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.
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.
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.
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
"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 begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
Sometimes I'll leave the house and go to a delicatessen down the street from me - it's been there a million years - just because I can look at people.
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.
I learn things late-and only the hard way.
Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.
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.
Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?
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.
To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every 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.
I don't have a cellphone or a computer. I deliberately circumscribe my mental life within the periods that I write about, and the power of Perfidia is that it's the result of complete immersion. I was there for the two years that it took me to write that book.
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.
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.
Some people don’t respond to civility.
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.
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.
It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one.
We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.
And you love to read, you love to escape, right?
Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.
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.
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.
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