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"I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers."
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"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."
"Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong."
"She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me."
"Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time."
"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."
"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."
"Many peoples' tombstones should read 'Died at 30, burried at 60.'"
Explore more quotes by James Ellroy
"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."
"I put on such a good show, the story is outrageous, and people don't want to hear that I'm basically a reasonable human being. As long as it continues to get me print, I'll continue to perform in an exuberant manner."
"I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored."
"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."
"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."
"As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me."
"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."
"My mother and I will continue on some level that I haven't determined yet. I think my mother's 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."
"Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it."
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