Quote

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.

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
Quiet
Careers
Cities
Woman
Kansas
Live
Loyal
Work
Profound
Things
City
Career

More quotes by James Ellroy

Image
I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things.
James Ellroy
Image
I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
James Ellroy
Image
I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.
James Ellroy
Image
L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.
James Ellroy
Image
I kept saying, Stop me now. It's going to my head. I got some photos. Really, I did! It's not my noblest sexual self in these moments, but I want to have fun. I want to undress. I get off my leash to go out and perform. Some other writers are just discomforted by the way I behave in public. Because they're loath to perform.
James Ellroy
Image
L.A. ispolluted. It's overpopulated. But it is very much home. It was inevitable for me, the moving back. I was living in San Francisco, and Joan broke it off with me, and I needed a place to live. I'd been divorced. And I needed to write movies and TV shows to earn a living. Alimony. All that. So I figured what the hell, I'll go back to L.A.
James Ellroy
Image
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.
James Ellroy
Image
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
Image
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.
James Ellroy
Image
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
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
Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.
James Ellroy
Image
Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.
James Ellroy
Image
I work within the framework of a very concerted, purely driven Protestant Christian mindset. I had dark early circumstances. I went inward. I have a sturdy will. I have a big heart. I'm a decent guy. And I have a great gift. It's blunted me to the world in many ways.
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
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
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.
James Ellroy
Image
I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.
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
I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.
James Ellroy