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Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.
James Ellroy
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James Ellroy
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 4
Autobiographer
Crime Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Write
Scratches
Writing
Bite
Bites
Cats
Gotta
Dogs
Cat
Dog
Scratch
More quotes by James Ellroy
I don't have children. I serve the world and I serve God by living as deep within my work as I can, reveling in the language of other times and putting it forth for the world.
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
I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things.
James Ellroy
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
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
I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.
James Ellroy
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
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
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
I needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.
James Ellroy
There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.
James Ellroy
Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.
James Ellroy
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
As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.
James Ellroy
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
I learn things late-and only the hard way.
James Ellroy
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
Joe Wambaugh's a friend. I know him only casually, but I like him a lot. I think he likes my books.
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
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
James Ellroy