Quotes About Author

It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents.

I sometimes think, with despair, that Americans will swallow whole any political speech whatever—we've been doing very little else, these last, bad years

His courtesy is as real as her trouble.

A child is too self-centered to relate to any dilemma that does not, somehow relate to him.

The author must rob us of our myths, and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back or personalities.

It is one thing to demand justice in literature, and another thing to face the price that one has got to pay for it in life.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Dr Johnson said, the inscription should have been in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent, should be.

A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book means thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.

Do not ask, What core values should we hold? Ask instead, What core values do we truly and passionately hold?

they cannot learn the essential character traits that make them right for your organization.

The purpose of compensation is not to "motivate" the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get and keep the right people in the first place.

Only an elaborate treatise in ecology could do justice to the subject of what went wrong

Don Sisco y Vivera, in July of 1588

he's a maggot-eaten fool and we'll be dead because of him.

The Bible, unfortunately, gives us only the barest outline of the flight into Egypt.

I make it a policy never to argue with drug lawyers: they have decent arguments and the best drugs.

Communism has no greater ally in this country than the half-baked hysterical charges against leaders of this country by political opponents.

Sometimes I felt connections begging to be made, sometimes I cursed myself for not having ten percent more gray matter, sometimes the report carbons just made me think of Lee.

Achtung, motherfuckers. And good afternoon. I'm James Ellroy; the death dog with the hog log, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I am the author of eighteen books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. They are books for the whole fucking family, if the name of your family is the Manson family.

All I have is withering perception. Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate.

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.

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