Quotes from James Ellroy

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 love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.

I'm trying to be less bombastic. I love my books. I think I've done things nobody else has done.

And you love to read, you love to escape, right?

I have a very intense marriage.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

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.

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.

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.

Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.

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 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.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

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.

There's a kid or some kids somewhere. I'll never know them. They're particle-puzzle-cubing right now. They might be mini-misanthropes from Moosefart, Montana. They might be demi-dystopians from Dogdick, Delaware. They dig my demonic dramas. The metaphysic maims them. They grasp the gravity. They'll duke it out with their demons. They'll serve a surfeit of survival skills. They won't be chronologically crucified. They'll shore up my shit. They'll radically revise it. They'll pass it along.

1:52 a.m. His favorite nightcap—coffee and Benzedrine.

It's time to demythologise an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.

You can't make history all the time, Dougie. Sometimes the best you can do is make money.

He took three shots a night-no more, no less. He switched from whisky to straight gin. The bum compensated for the scant volume. Three shots tweaked his hatreds. Four shots and up cut those hatreds all the way loose. Three shots said, You project danger. Four shots or more said, You're ugly and you limp.

I didn't care who we were. I required no consummation. I knew that whoever we were and whatever we had would never stop.

I got an alibi, just in case you think I did it. Tighter than a crab's ass, and that is air tight.

They were heedless of the fact that they'd gain more converts if they just stopped talking.

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.

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.