Quote

I like to have fun out there. I work hard, and then I get to cut loose and go out and tour, and I enjoy it. I like to go out and meet the people. I love to sell books.

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
Books
Enjoy
Loose
Book
Tour
Hard
Sell
Work
Sells
Love
Meet
Like
Cutting
People
Fun

More quotes by 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 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
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
Joe Wambaugh's a friend. I know him only casually, but I like him a lot. I think he likes my books.
James Ellroy
Image
There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.
James Ellroy
Image
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
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
I was in L.A. in '08. It was a cold Saturday night. I had spread my phone number out to a score of women and was just indulging this sweet, sad, elegiac, bale loneliness - don't tell me you haven't been there.
James Ellroy
Image
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
Image
As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.
James Ellroy
Image
Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.
James Ellroy
Image
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
Image
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.
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'm grateful for the life I have. I lived bad for many years, and I've got a great life now. I've got the kind of life people only dream about.
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
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
Image
L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.
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
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