Quotes from James Ellroy

Envy thou not the oppressor, And choose none of his ways. —Proverbs 3:31

I learn things late—and only the hard way.

Take note of what you are seeking, for it is seeking you.

Silver Shirts

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.

They saw the O.J. job as a crass microcosm. It was cocaine and tit jobs. It was health club narcissism and the two-way bondage of five-figure monthly alimony payments. The bottom-level audience defined the crime. They wanted O.J.'s meretricious lifestyle. They couldn't have it. They settled for a skanky morality play that told them that lifestyle was venal.

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.

green leather chairs arranged around low tables and settees; huge stone fireplace; small Oriental throw rugs, multicolored, placed together at different angles, so that just the right amount of oak floor bordered them. The walls were cherrywood, and featured framed sepias of the family and their ancestors.

Cheap novels and cheap films about cheap people ran concurrent with American boosterism and yahooism and made a subversive point just by being. They described a fully existing fringe America and fed viewers and readers the demography of a Secret Pervert Republic. It was just garish enough to be laughed off as unreal and just pathetic enough to be recognizably human.

The thrill of noir is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation. The social importance of noir is its grounding in the big themes of race, class, gender, and systemic corruption. The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.

L.A. Weekly piece was coming out in mid-February. Day One

Trust wolves before you trust dashing and fawning young men.

The profusion of cherry lights, flashlights and headbeams darted over the lot, picking out details: mud puddles reflecting moonlight and shadows, the neon haze of Hollywood in the distance.

The incumbent Sheriff, "Kickback" Kit Denkins, was a notorious no-goodnik. He took bribes from crooked building contractors and solicited high school girls for their soiled underwear.

Facts can be bent to conform to any thesis.

I got in the car and headed home, wondering if I would ever tell Kay that I didn't have a woman because sex tasted like blood and resin and suture scrub to me.

John Purvis joined his mother and lawyer on the Phil Donahue show.

Jack went deep-vein sclerotic. He chugged digitalis straight from the vial. He chased it with desk-jug scotch.

Hoffa said, "Fucking Jesus turned fish into bread, and that's about the only thing I haven't tried. I've spent six hundred grand on the primaries and bought every fucking cop and alderman and councilman and mayor and fucking grand juror and senator and judge and DA and fucking prosecutorial investigator who'd let me. I'm like Jesus trying to part the Red Fucking Sea and not getting no further than some motel on the beach.

The rye made him sweat; the beer gave him goose bumps. The combination tamped down his nerves.

Por la Causa. Be brazen, be bold.

May giant circus elephants shit on your lawn. May bug-eyed gargoyles eat your young.

He cheats on his income tax." Dudley ha! ha! ha!'d. "So do I, so does my friend Malcolm and so would our grand savior Jesus Christ should he return and settle in America.

It wasn't supposed to end this way. They were out to create a decorous courtroom document. They were out to destroy a barbarous ideology. They were supposed to exchange letters and call each other Katherine and William in due time.