James Ellroy Quotes About Giving
-
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.
→ -
"War gives men a plain-and-simple something to do ... Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate." It's a romantic manifesto.
→ -
There are a lot of Ellroy lifts, man. This guy went to school. But then there's a willful thing that comes over me - God gives it to me - where I go, "That's real nice, let's just go home, pat yourself on the back, good dog, good dog, and wake up in the morning and go to work."
→ -
In the time just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Perfidia opens, we were pre-psychologized. There were no concepts of identity, no politics of victimization. Reparation wasn't in the language. Nobody thought about giving the great grandchildren of black slaves so much as $1.98. And all of a sudden the bombs hit, interventionism versus isolationism became a dead issue, and it was us-versus-them in a heartbeat.
→ -
The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's the combination of that meticulousness and the power of the prose and, I think, the depth of the characterizations and the risks that I've taken with language that give the books their clout. And that's where I get pissed off at a lot of my younger readers.
→ -
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.
→ -
Anything less than total candor was bullshit. I owed that to my readers, I owed that to myself, and I owed that most specifically to my mother. I've had some thrilling moments in my 18-year literary career to this point, and nothing comes close to giving Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, the farm girl from Tunnel City, Wisconsin, to the world.
→ -
As critical acclaim and response has built up, every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I've created about my work and refine it.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Mickey Cohen Gangster -
Otto Penzler Editor -
Don Winslow Author -
Mia Kirshner Actress -
George Pelecanos Author -
Curtis Hanson Film director -
Brian De Palma Film director -
Dashiell Hammett Author -
Brian Helgeland Screenwriter -
Elmore Leonard Novelist -
Michael Connelly Author -
Joseph Wambaugh Writer -
Raymond Chandler Novelist -
Jim Thompson Author -
James Crumley Author -
Edward Bunker Author -
Ian Rankin Crime writer -
James M. Cain Author -
Dennis Lehane Author -
Kim Basinger Actress