Quotes from James Ellroy

Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man.

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.

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.

Call me Dudley. We're of equal rank. I'm older, but you're far better looking. I can tell we're going to be grand partners.

He used to pimp and pull shakedowns. Now he rode shotgun to History.

Don't make a career out of underestimating me." — Claire de Haven

I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them

You get up in the morning because you might meet a woman. And if you stay at home by yourself, alone, you will not meet a woman.

Classical music fulfills for me the function of narrative. I spend 90 minutes a day listening to symphonic music - Beethoven to Bartók - some chamber pieces, and that's my enrichment.

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.

As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.

I don't think I came out of anybody. I think I developed out of the influences I described in My Dark Places. American history, L.A. of the 1950s. I'm comfortable with that.

L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.

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.

We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.

I'm clenched down, I'm locked in on it, which is my general approach to life.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

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 needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.

I'm grateful for the life I have. I lived bad for many years, and I've got a great life now. I've got the kind of life people only dream about.

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 want to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their humanity.

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.

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