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I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.

James Ellroy

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James Ellroy
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 4
Autobiographer
Crime Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Fiction
Movies
Pervades
Self
Noir
Great
Unspoken
Think
Theme
Thinking
Male
Males
Pity

More quotes by James Ellroy

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Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.
James Ellroy
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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.
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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 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
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I learn things late-and only the hard way.
James Ellroy
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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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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
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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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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
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Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
James Ellroy
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Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
James Ellroy
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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.
James Ellroy
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I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.
James Ellroy
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I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
James Ellroy
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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
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If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.
James Ellroy
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I needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.
James Ellroy
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L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.
James Ellroy
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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.
James Ellroy
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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.
James Ellroy