192 Quotes by James Ellroy

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.

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.

I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them.

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There’s an essay I’ve written where I talked about living in the past. There’s a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.

Don’t make a career out of underestimating me.” – Claire de Haven.

And the only forms of socialism in the world that were then getting results – malign ones, as it was – were the Fascist and Soviet republics. Fascism is a form of socialism – you rebuild the country, you find a scapegoat, and you go from there.

The truth of the matter is, you lose a parent to murder when you’re 10 years old, and in fact at the time of the murder you hate your lost parent, my mother in my case.

The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.