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My mother and I will continue on some level that I havent determined yet. I think my mothers a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career.

James Ellroy

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James Ellroy
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 4
Autobiographer
Crime Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Writing
Career
Think
Careers
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World
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Thrill
Mother
Mothers
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More quotes by James Ellroy

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I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
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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.
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I don't want to recover from writing this book [The Onion]. I feel very poised. I feel like I'm with my mother for the first time ever. I feel like I've confronted her, and the confrontation goes on.
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Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.
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The novel is final form it's the ultimate individual final form. Television and motion pictures never get there. You'd be fabulous to think that something you write is even going to be filmed. I give it the best shot of which I'm capable. But it's more a payday for me. And if I didn't have alimony and the full-time assistant.
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I learn things late-and only the hard way.
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I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
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If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.
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I got a woman I'm loyal to above all things, above my career. She's profound to me. I'm quiet. I live in Kansas City. I work.
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I'd never been interested in the Kennedy assassination until '88, when I read Libra. And from that point, I went out and bought the existing Kennedy theory books, most of which are outlandish. But what DeLillo posits - some rogue CIA guys - is the most dramatically sound, plausible explanation for it.
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I don't have a cellphone or a computer. I deliberately circumscribe my mental life within the periods that I write about, and the power of Perfidia is that it's the result of complete immersion. I was there for the two years that it took me to write that book.
James Ellroy
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The lunatic populism that preceded the Pearl Harbor bombing is astonishing in its permutations, its crisscrossings. Guys like [Catholic priest and controversial radio broadcaster] Father Coughlin and [racist and anti-Semitic agitator and founder of the Christian Nationalist Crusade] Gerald L.K. Smith started out as share-the-wealth socialists.
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You get up in the morning because you might meet a woman. And if you stay at home by yourself, alone, you will not meet a woman.
James Ellroy
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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.
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Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
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I'm grateful for the life I have. I lived bad for many years, and I've got a great life now. I've got the kind of life people only dream about.
James Ellroy
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Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.
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Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
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I don't think I came out of anybody. I think I developed out of the influences I described in My Dark Places. American history, L.A. of the 1950s. I'm comfortable with that.
James Ellroy
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I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.
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