James Ellroy Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

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

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

James Ellroy
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.

James Ellroy
She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them.

James Ellroy
Where's your sketch pad? I asked. … I gave that up, Kay said. I wasn't very good, so I changed my major. To what? To pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history. I like a woman who knows what she wants. Kay smiled. So do I, but I don't know any.

James Ellroy
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.

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

James Ellroy
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.

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

James Ellroy
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.

James Ellroy
I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.

James Ellroy
Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

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.

James Ellroy
When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

James Ellroy
All I want to do is make serious movies that explore social issues and turn a profit, and slip the schnitzel to Jane DePugh.

James Ellroy