Quotes from James Ellroy

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.

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 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 have a very intense marriage.

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.

Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.

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.

To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning.

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.

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.

I am the son of a murdered woman—anybody who'd call my books misogynistic is, frankly, out of their fucking mind.

Some people don't respond to civility.

It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one.

Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.

It all came down to money - the great equalizer and common denominator.

Closure is bullshit.

Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.

She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them.

Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.

My dad was always snoozing on the couch, like Dagwood Bumstead. He was a lazy motherfucker. God bless him. He was always working on some kind of get-rich-quick scheme. This is what my dad was like: I'd say, Hey, Dad, we studied penguins today in school. He'd say, Yeah? I'm a penguin fucker from way back. Dad, I saw a giraffe at the zoo today. Yeah? I'm a giraffe fucker from way back. That's my dad. My dad was a giraffe fucker.

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.

We burned down rooms. We knew what everything meant. We understood terror and fury as no one else had. It hurt to be together and hurt more to be apart. Our mouths clashed. Our teeth scraped. Our arms ached from the meld. We knew each other's smells and heard each other's voices and told each other things that no one else ever had.

Don't be so goddamn proper. Don't be such a fucking saint.

Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?