top of page
Exlpore more Work quotes

"If you need an alarm clock, you need a new job."

"Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do."

"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."

"A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth."

"Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing."

"Speaking about work isn't working."

"You can be the most productive and most effective, but politics show up as ego, jealousy and sabotage from bosses who can't perform."

"The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary."
Explore more quotes by James Ellroy

"Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist."

"I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."
bottom of page