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I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

James Ellroy

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James Ellroy
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 4
Autobiographer
Crime Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Responses
Ambiguous
Provoking
Readers
Response
Reader
Would
Like
Provoke

More quotes by James Ellroy

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I'm trying to be less bombastic. I love my books. I think I've done things nobody else has done.
James Ellroy
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There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.
James Ellroy
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I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would rather err on the side of too much authority than too little.
James Ellroy
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I needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.
James Ellroy
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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
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I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.
James Ellroy
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There are a lot of Ellroy lifts, man. This guy went to school. But then there's a willful thing that comes over me - God gives it to me - where I go, That's real nice, let's just go home, pat yourself on the back, good dog, good dog, and wake up in the morning and go to work.
James Ellroy
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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
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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.
James Ellroy
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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
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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
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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.
James Ellroy
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We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.
James Ellroy
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Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?
James Ellroy
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Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
James Ellroy
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I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.
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.
James Ellroy
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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
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Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.
James Ellroy
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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