Top 90 James Ellroy Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I learn things late-and only the hard way.”

— James Ellroy

2. “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

3. “Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You’re in with the former, but my God I don’t envy the blood on your conscience.”

— James Ellroy

4. “Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.”

— James Ellroy

5. “It was easy not to think of my future; I didn’t have one.”

— James Ellroy

6. “Anybody who doesn’t know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.”

— James Ellroy

7. “As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.”

— James Ellroy

8. “I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.”

— James Ellroy

9. “Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.”

— James Ellroy

10. “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

11. “To me, there’s nothing on earth other than women. It’s why I get out of bed every morning.”

— James Ellroy

12. “I’ve created a narrative of the world. I live in the world – tenuously, most times. I’ve avoided the digital world.”

— James Ellroy

13. “Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.”

— James Ellroy

14. “Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.”

— James Ellroy

15. “Some people don’t respond to civility.”

— James Ellroy

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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

— James Ellroy

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

— James Ellroy

21. “I’ve been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.”

— James Ellroy

22. “I got an emergency leave. I visited my dad on his deathbed. His last words to me: “Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.”

— James Ellroy

23. “The Latin inscription on the Pall Mall cigarette pack – “In Hoc Signo Vinces” – translated as “With this sign we shall conquer” – was a tentative means of homo identification.”

— James Ellroy

24. “I settled in to watch a Dragnet rerun. I bought the judge in four of Jack Webb’s drunk-driving beefs. I shtupped Jack’s ex-wife, soaring songstress Julie London.”

— James Ellroy

25. “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.”

— James Ellroy

26. “All dressed up and no one to kill.”

— James Ellroy

27. “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.”

— James Ellroy

28. “You get up in the morning because you might meet a woman. And if you stay at home by yourself, alone, you will not meet a woman.”

— James Ellroy

29. “And you love to read, you love to escape, right?”

— James Ellroy

30. “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.”

— James Ellroy

31. “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

32. “I don’t know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don’t know any criminals.”

— James Ellroy

33. “The 1950s to me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behind most doors waiting to creep out. The 1950s to most people is kitsch and Mickey Mouse watches and all this intolerable stuff...”

— James Ellroy

34. “Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.”

— James Ellroy

35. “I saw crime everywhere. Crime was not isolated incidents destined for ultimate solution and adjudication. Crime was the continual circumstance. It was all day, every day. The ramifications extended to the 12th of Never. This is a policeman’s view of crime. I did not know it then.”

— James Ellroy

36. “I indulge prayer when the world seems incomprehensible and only a plea to the incomprehensible makes sense.”

— James Ellroy

37. “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

38. “For a much lauded writer, I’m not terribly self-absorbed. In social situations, which are difficult for me – I mean, this is an interview – I’m normally uncomfortable talking about myself.”

— James Ellroy

39. “Pulling away, I realized I had no place to go and nothing I wanted to do except satisfy my curiosity about a woman who was coming on like gangbusters and a big load of grief.”

— James Ellroy

40. “There is no proportion. Pearl Harbor took care of that.”

— James Ellroy

41. “Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.”

— James Ellroy

42. “I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would rather err on the side of too much authority than too little.”

— James Ellroy

43. “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.”

— James Ellroy

44. “Scripture-pure veracity and scandal-rag content. That conjunction gives it its sizzle. You carry the seed of belief within you already. You recall the time this narrative captures and sense conspiracy. I am here to tell you that it is all true and not at all what you think. You will read with some reluctance and capitulate in the end. The following pages will force you to succumb. I am going to tell you everything.”

— James Ellroy

45. “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

46. “I am the most well-adjusted human being I know. I started out this investigation as a very happy man with a great career. I’ve got the life people dream about: I am rich, I am famous, I’ve got a fabulous marriage to an absolutely, spell-bindingly brilliant woman.”

— James Ellroy

47. “When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.”

— James Ellroy

48. “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.”

— James Ellroy

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

— James Ellroy

50. “I have insane curiosity as to what happened in all these events. I will never know. I’m not a researcher. I don’t possess that kind of mind. I have a researcher who compiles the fact sheets and chronologies that allow me to write these big books of mine.”

— James Ellroy