Quotes from James Ellroy

Noir works, whether films, novels, or short stories, are existential, pessimistic tales about people, including(or especially) protagonists, who are seriously flawed and morally questionable.

If you find light and hilarity in these pages, I strongly recommend a visit to a mental health professional. Otto Penzler

I walked to the heart of the neon smear.

The system worked because America was yet to buck race riots and assassinations and environmental bullshit and gender confusion and drug proliferation and gun mania and religious psychoses linked to a media implosion and an emerging cult of victimhood—a 25-year transit of divisive bad juju that resulted in a stultifying mass skepticism.

eunuch's tit—

All dressed up and no one to kill.

He was wearing an American Legion poppy on his lapel – probably purchased from the wino legionnaire who slept in the Hall of Records parking lot – a man he had once vigorously prosecuted for vagrancy. The

Claire De Haven is a promiscuous woman, women like that are unbalanced

Exley thinks I bought law school with bribe money. I said four men, shotguns, Junior Stemmons as co-boss. Exley: "Jackets and ties; this will end up

Mini-Manson" case

A Vollmer maxim hit home: "In murders of extreme passion, the killer will always betray his pathology. If the detective is willing to sort physical evidence objectively and then think subjectively from the killer's viewpoint, he will often solve crimes that are baffling in their randomness.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

Language liberates as it offends. Confidential taught me that.

But he listed Wayne's blinding as unsolved. The snake venom had bleached his pupils white, and the skin around his eye sockets had required grafts. The doctors had had to use skin from his buttocks, and because his buttocks were hairy, the skin around his eyes grew hair, too.

I'm seventy and in baaaaad fucking shape. I've consumed scads of scotch and sucked three packs a day since I shot out the chute.

It's tough being a dangerous old man by yourself—you've got nothing but memories and no one with the balls to understand them.

I was afraid of all girls, most boys and selected male and female adults. My fear derived from my apocalyptic fantasy apparatus. I knew that all things went chaotically bad. My empirical training in chaos was unassailably valid.

You've made a wise choice, lad...I won't insult your intelligence with the word 'trust'.

There's a world we can't see. It exists separately and concurrently with the real world. You enter this world by the offering of prayer and incantation. You live in this world wholly within your mind. You dispel the real world through mental discipline. You rebuff the real world through your enforced mental will. Your interior world will give you what you want and what you need to survive.

The restaurant was packed with camera-toting tourists wolfing the "Rose Bowl Special"—hangtown fry, flapjacks, Bloody Marys and coffee.

Thundershowers hit just before midnight, drowning out the horn honks and noisemaker blare that usually signalled New Year's on the Strip, bringing 1950 to the West Hollywood Substation in a wave of hot squeals with meat wagon backup.

Stoner learned that men killed women for lawn mowers and crockpots.

Head-on impact. The frontseat men sustain massive chest wounds. Their hearts explode. The backseat men sustain downward-thrust trauma and are thus disemboweled.

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. Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight.