Top 100 James Ellroy Quotes
#1. I want to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their humanity.
James Ellroy
#2. Lose thirty pounds within the next thirty days, or I'll have Chief Horrall put you on the 'Fat Husband's Diet' recently extolled in the Ladies' Home Journal.
James Ellroy
#3. As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.
James Ellroy
#4. 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.
James Ellroy
#5. Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.
James Ellroy
#6. 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.
James Ellroy
#7. 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.
James Ellroy
#8. 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.
James Ellroy
#9. 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.
James Ellroy
#10. 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.
James Ellroy
#12. I got an emergency leave. I visited my dad on his deathbed. His last words to me: "Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.
James Ellroy
#13. Blue eyes so light that it looked like she sent them out to be bleached
James Ellroy
#14. I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.
James Ellroy
#15. I settled in to watch a Dragnet rerun. I bought the judge in four of Jack Webb's drunk-driving beefs. I shtupped Jack's ex-wife, soaring songstress Julie London.
James Ellroy
#16. He felt sandbagged. Doomsday, Armageddon. Booze begets instant misconduct and regret. He walked to the couch and fell down.
James Ellroy
#17. 1:52 a.m. His favorite nightcap - coffee and Benzedrine.
James Ellroy
#18. I loved men and was going mad with suppressed desire. It pushed me into a series of affairs with dubious jazz musicians. Sex was not what I imagined. It was tension, scent and prosaic misalliance. It was sweet and sad revelation, and all expectation dashed.
James Ellroy
#19. 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!!!!!!!!!!
James Ellroy
#20. I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.
James Ellroy
#21. Qualifications don't count. All Ike did was invade Europe and look like your uncle.
James Ellroy
#22. Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
James Ellroy
#23. There is no proportion. Pearl Harbor took care of that.
James Ellroy
#24. Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
James Ellroy
#25. If it would've been me, I would've left Hutch out of it. 'Cause Hutch, he was mean.
James Ellroy
#26. It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one.
James Ellroy
#27. 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.
James Ellroy
#28. 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.
James Ellroy
#29. I'm clenched down, I'm locked in on it, which is my general approach to life.
James Ellroy
#30. Dear FB Friends,
Fuck Facebook!!!!! - It has proven to be worthless as a book-selling device, and is nothing but a repository for perverts, reparation-seekers, old buddies looking for handouts, syphillitic ex-girlfriends looking for extra-curricular schlong and hack writers begging for blurbs.
James Ellroy
#31. Cab drivers are night-riding denizens of the first order. They view wretched foibles from a gutter perspective.
James Ellroy
#32. Jimmy Hoffa said, "I know how Jesus must have felt. The fucking pharaohs rose to power on his coattails like the fucking Kennedy brothers are rising on mine."
Heshie Ryskind said, "Get your history straight. It was Julius Caesar that did Jesus in.
James Ellroy
#33. I wanted to portray a newly democratized, enclosed society. I wanted to show how extraordinarily fluid people are in their embrace of other human beings.
James Ellroy
#34. There are a lot of Ellroy lifts, man. This guy went to school. But then there's a willful thing that comes over me - God gives it to me - where I go, "That's real nice, let's just go home, pat yourself on the back, good dog, good dog, and wake up in the morning and go to work."
James Ellroy
#35. The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.
James Ellroy
#36. Some Japs killed themselves. Who gives a shit? No tickee, no washee. Where's Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto? It's Sunday morning - this sure beats church.
James Ellroy
#37. Silverlake-Echo was several miles due est of Mount lee, a hilly area with lots of twisting streets, greenery and seclusion, the kind of terrain a necrophiliac might find soothing.
James Ellroy
#38. I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.
James Ellroy
#39. Don't make a career out of underestimating me." - Claire de Haven
James Ellroy
#40. All I want to do is make serious movies that explore social issues and turn a profit, and slip the schnitzel to Jane DePugh.
James Ellroy
#41. It's all sex for me. Politics is sex. Race is sex. It's the novel. It's the novel!
James Ellroy
#42. Dudley snatched Blanchard's plate. That lad shouting racial slurs may be offending Dr. Ashida. Please take him someplace secluded and kick the shit out of him.
James Ellroy
#43. I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.
James Ellroy
#44. The left one's the hospital, the right one's death. The right one steals your life while the left steals your breath. These hands are bad juju and the bad boogaloo, they're the teeth of the demon as he slides down the flue.
James Ellroy
#45. I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.
James Ellroy
#46. All I have is withering perception. Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate.
James Ellroy
#47. Serial killers were hopped-up eyeball fuckers and ravaged inner children. They were scary in the moment and as dismissible as an empty box of popcorn.
James Ellroy
#48. 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.
James Ellroy
#49. So many wicked ways to scandal-skin a cat.
James Ellroy
#50. 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.
James Ellroy
#51. I don't have children. I serve the world and I serve God by living as deep within my work as I can, reveling in the language of other times and putting it forth for the world.
James Ellroy
#53. L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.
James Ellroy
#54. I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
James Ellroy
#55. Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
James Ellroy
#56. Envy thou not the oppressor, And choose none of his ways. - Proverbs 3:31
James Ellroy
#57. 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.
James Ellroy
#58. 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.
James Ellroy
#59. Your death defines my life. I want to find the love we never had and explicate it in your name.
I want to take your secrets public. I want to burn down the distance between us.
I want to give you breath.
James Ellroy
#60. 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.
James Ellroy
#61. "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.
James Ellroy
#62. There's a beast in me. I destroy those I cannot control. I must be certain that those close to me share my identical interests. I'm benevolent within that construction. I'm ghastly outside of it.
James Ellroy
#63. They moved me and scared me. I replayed the tapes and nailed the source of my fear. The women sounded smug. They were entrenched and content in their victimhood.
James Ellroy
#64. I am the son of a murdered woman - anybody who'd call my books misogynistic is, frankly, out of their fucking mind.
James Ellroy
#65. I got an alibi, just in case you think I did it. Tighter than a crab's ass, and that is air tight.
James Ellroy
#66. 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.
James Ellroy
#67. You can't make history all the time, Dougie.
Sometimes the best you can do is make money.
James Ellroy
#68. 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.
James Ellroy
#69. 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.
James Ellroy
#71. I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
James Ellroy
#72. 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.
James Ellroy
#73. 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.
James Ellroy
#74. I want to burn down the distance between us
James Ellroy
#75. 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.
James Ellroy
#76. 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.
James Ellroy
#77. 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.
James Ellroy
#78. 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.
James Ellroy
#80. History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.
James Ellroy
#81. You'd be better served taxing your conscience for those who deserve your regret.
James Ellroy
#82. There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.
James Ellroy
#83. Other people, some other writers, will win certain accolades or sell in far greater numbers than me - and I'm a legitimate best-selling author - but I live and die for the work. That's thrilling to me. It's thrilling that I do for others what certain writers did for me when I was a kid.
James Ellroy
#84. Fear and I played peek-a-boo - it always seemed to grab my balls and twist just when it felt like something inside me could banish all the bullshit forever.
James Ellroy
#85. And you love to read, you love to escape, right?
James Ellroy
#86. I had chewed a big steak two hours before, swallowing the juice and spitting out the meat, and I could smell animal blood in my sweat.
James Ellroy
#87. Yes, my friends - it's becoming Jewniversally apparent.
James Ellroy
#88. 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 ...
James Ellroy
#89. Sometimes I felt connections begging to be made, sometimes I cursed myself for not having ten percent more gray matter, sometimes the report carbons just made me think of Lee.
James Ellroy
#90. May giant circus elephants shit on your lawn. May bug-eyed gargoyles eat your young.
James Ellroy
#91. It all came down to money - the great equalizer and common denominator.
James Ellroy
#92. Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.
James Ellroy
#93. They were heedless of the fact that they'd gain more converts if they just stopped talking.
James Ellroy
#94. Don't be so goddamn proper. Don't be such a fucking saint.
James Ellroy
#95. Breuning drove. Dudley sat up front Carlisle sat in back, with three sawed-off shotguns.
James Ellroy
#96. Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man.
James Ellroy
#97. 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.
James Ellroy
#98. I indulge prayer when the world seems incomprehensible and only a plea to the incomprehensible makes sense.
James Ellroy
#99. I put on a good show. I strutted my new faith in high histrionic style. I believed what I was saying for the length of time I was saying it. I possessed a chameleon soul.
James Ellroy
#100. 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.
James Ellroy
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