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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
Time
Mother
Like
Ever
Poised
Firsts
Onion
Book
Onions
First
Confronted
Feel
Recover
Feels
Confrontation
Writing
Goes

More quotes by 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.
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I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things.
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I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
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I got a woman I'm loyal to above all things, above my career. She's profound to me. I'm quiet. I live in Kansas City. I work.
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The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers.
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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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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.
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If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.
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Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
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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.
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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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L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.
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We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.
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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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I always cringe when a male friend of mine, who's very fixated on women, puts compatibility at the top of his list of attributes that he would be looking for in a woman. I would replace compatibility with dialectic.
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There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.
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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.
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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.
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Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
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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