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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.

James Ellroy

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James Ellroy
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 4
Autobiographer
Crime Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Like
Ever
Poised
Firsts
Onion
Book
Onions
First
Confronted
Feel
Recover
Feels
Confrontation
Writing
Goes
Time
Mother

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.
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There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.
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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
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I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things.
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Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.
James Ellroy
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I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.
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I learn things late-and only the hard way.
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Joe Wambaugh's a friend. I know him only casually, but I like him a lot. I think he likes my books.
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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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Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.
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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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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