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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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James Ellroy
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 4
Autobiographer
Crime Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Came
Dark
Influences
American
Described
History
Developed
Think
Places
Thinking
Anybody
Comfortable
Influence

More quotes by James Ellroy

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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
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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
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Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.
James Ellroy
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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.
James Ellroy
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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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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
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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.
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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I learn things late-and only the hard way.
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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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
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I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things.
James Ellroy
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If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.
James Ellroy
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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 I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.
James Ellroy
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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
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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
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There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.
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 the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.
James Ellroy