Quotes by 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.
• 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.
• I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.
• 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 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.
• I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.
• I have a very intense marriage.
• I haven't been to a movie in a year and a half.
• 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 love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.
• Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.
• I want to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their humanity.
• 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 would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
• 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.
• I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.
• 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 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.
• As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.
• 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.
• Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
• Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.
• 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.
• 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.