James Ellroy Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• 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.

  James Ellroy

  Giving, Interviews, Chance

• 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.

  James Ellroy

  Grandchildren, Issues, Giving

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 9, 2014.

• 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

  Writing, Air, Data

  Interview by Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 9, 2014.

• 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."

  James Ellroy

  Dog, Morning, Real

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 9, 2014.

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Giving

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 9, 2014.

• "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.

  James Ellroy

  War, Writing, Fate

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 9, 2014.

• 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.

  James Ellroy

  Girl, Mother, Tunnels

  "The Onion talks to crime-fiction kingpin James Ellroy". Interview with John Krewson, www.avclub.com. November 20, 1996.

• 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

  Mother, Writing, Character

• 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.

  James Ellroy

  Book, Taken, Writing

  "The Onion talks to crime-fiction kingpin James Ellroy". Interview by John Krewson, www.avclub.com. November 20, 1996.

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