James Ellroy
James Ellroy
Lee Earle "James" Ellroyis an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 March 1948
CountryUnited States of America
I drank, I used drugs, I broke into houses, sniffed women's undergarments. I ate Benzedrex inhalers, jacked off for 18 hours at a pop, lived with my dad in a shitpad .
Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.
I'm grateful for the life I have. I lived bad for many years, and I've got a great life now. I've got the kind of life people only dream about.
My father actually went to college, and my mother went to nursing school, so, you know. I wouldn't... They were actually too square and right-wing to be hip, too well-educated to be white trash, too sexy to be square. They really didn't fit any mold. They weren't really hipsters. They were just - they were two of a kind, those two.
Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.
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.
To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning.
I've created a narrative of the world. I live in the world - tenuously, most times. I've avoided the digital world.
I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
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."
All I want to do is make serious movies that explore social issues and turn a profit, and slip the schnitzel to Jane DePugh.
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.
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.