Quote

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

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
Think
Deal
Thinking
Deals
Dead
Noir
Views
Expanded
Taken
Historically
American
Novelist
Simple
Novelists
Great
View

More quotes by James Ellroy

Image
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.
James Ellroy
Image
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
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 don't feel in any way obligated to remain current with the culture. I feel no social obligation whatsoever. I trust my morality in the narrow path I trek through the world as I work.
James Ellroy
Image
I work within the framework of a very concerted, purely driven Protestant Christian mindset. I had dark early circumstances. I went inward. I have a sturdy will. I have a big heart. I'm a decent guy. And I have a great gift. It's blunted me to the world in many ways.
James Ellroy
Image
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
James Ellroy
Image
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
Image
There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.
James Ellroy
Image
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.
James Ellroy
Image
I want to have enough data, so I won't write myself into thin air, so that I can extrapolate and give you this secret human infrastructure. The only way I sate my own curiosity is to create this from scratch. There must be commanding love stories. There must be great moral cost.
James Ellroy
Image
I'm trying to be less bombastic. I love my books. I think I've done things nobody else has done.
James Ellroy
Image
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
Image
L.A. ispolluted. It's overpopulated. But it is very much home. It was inevitable for me, the moving back. I was living in San Francisco, and Joan broke it off with me, and I needed a place to live. I'd been divorced. And I needed to write movies and TV shows to earn a living. Alimony. All that. So I figured what the hell, I'll go back to L.A.
James Ellroy
Image
Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
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
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
I kept saying, Stop me now. It's going to my head. I got some photos. Really, I did! It's not my noblest sexual self in these moments, but I want to have fun. I want to undress. I get off my leash to go out and perform. Some other writers are just discomforted by the way I behave in public. Because they're loath to perform.
James Ellroy
Image
I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
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