Quote

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

James Ellroy

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James Ellroy
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 4
Autobiographer
Crime Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Lived
Tolstoy
Crime
Beethoven
Novel
Novelist
Fiction
Russian
Greatest
Novelists
Also
Specific
Music
Master
Ever
Masters

More quotes by James Ellroy

Image
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
James Ellroy
Image
I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things.
James Ellroy
Image
Sometimes I'll leave the house and go to a delicatessen down the street from me - it's been there a million years - just because I can look at people.
James Ellroy
Image
Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
James Ellroy
Image
And the only forms of socialism in the world that were then getting results - malign ones, as it was - were the Fascist and Soviet republics. Fascism is a form of socialism - you rebuild the country, you find a scapegoat, and you go from there.
James Ellroy
Image
We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.
James Ellroy
Image
I'm not interested in popular culture. I hate Quentin Tarantino. I rarely go to movies. I hate rock 'n' roll. I work. I think. I listen to classical music. I brood. I like sports cars.
James Ellroy
Image
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
Image
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.
James Ellroy
Image
If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.
James Ellroy
Image
I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.
James Ellroy
Image
I needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.
James Ellroy
Image
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.
James Ellroy
Image
As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.
James Ellroy
Image
I was in L.A. in '08. It was a cold Saturday night. I had spread my phone number out to a score of women and was just indulging this sweet, sad, elegiac, bale loneliness - don't tell me you haven't been there.
James Ellroy
Image
I cleaned up. I quit drinking, I quit doing drugs, I quit stealing, I quit breaking into houses, I tried to quit being a bad human being. I developed a conscience later in life than many. I call it the lost-time-regained dynamic.
James Ellroy
Image
I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.
James Ellroy
Image
I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored.
James Ellroy
Image
Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.
James Ellroy
Image
I'm way past the idea of using ideology or political view as a gauge of human character. I simply don't believe it. And many people, I tend to think most people, feel that way. Since I don't have to worry about it, I'm happy.
James Ellroy