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My Role Relationship To The Event Will Continue To Mutate. My Relationship To My Mother Will Continue To Change As I Revise My Judgments Of Her Depending On What I Learn About Her. It Goes On. But I Feel No Less Obsessive About My Work And No Less Passionately Committed To The Life I Have Now, But I Feel Poised Inside. Which Is A Good Thing To Feel At 48.

-James Ellroy

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My Role Relationship To

James Ellroy

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My Role Relationship To The Event Will Continue To Mutate. My Relationship To My Mother Will Continue To Change As I Revise My Judgments Of Her Depending On What I Learn About Her. It Goes On. But I Feel No Less Obsessive About My Work And No Less Passionately Committed To The Life I Have Now, But I Feel Poised Inside. Which Is A Good Thing To Feel At 48.

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I Don't Have Children. I Serve The World And I Serve God By Living As Deep Within My Work As I Can, Reveling In The Language Of Other Times And Putting It Forth For The World.

I Almost Had An Intransigent Mental Spirit. I Always Wanted Things.

Anybody Who Doesn't Know That Politics Is Crime Has Got A Few Screws Loose.

I've Created A Narrative Of The World. I Live In The World - Tenuously, Most Times. I've Avoided The Digital World.

The 1950s To Me Is Darkness, Hidden History, Perversion Behind Most Doors Waiting To Creep Out. The 1950s To Most People Is Kitsch And Mickey Mouse Watches And All This Intolerable Stuff.

[raymond] Chandler, I Reread Him, And There's A Lot Of Bad Writing There. I Don't Think He Knew Much About People.

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.

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.

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.

I'm Way Past The Idea Of Using Ideology Or Political View As A Gauge Of Human Character. I Simply Don't Believe It. And Many People, I Tend To Think Most People, Feel That Way. Since I Don't Have To Worry About It, I'm Happy.

I Don't Have A Cellphone Or A Computer. I Deliberately Circumscribe My Mental Life Within The Periods That I Write About, And The Power Of Perfidia Is That It's The Result Of Complete Immersion. I Was There For The Two Years That It Took Me To Write That Book.

I Don't Think I Came Out Of Anybody. I Think I Developed Out Of The Influences I Described In My Dark Places. American History, L.a. Of The 1950s. I'm Comfortable With That.

I Begin By Assembling Notes On Characters. Large Swaths Of The Plot Become Clear To Me As I Do This.

You Get Up In The Morning Because You Might Meet A Woman. And If You Stay At Home By Yourself, Alone, You Will Not Meet A Woman.

You Try To Learn Who You Are. You Work Hard. You've Either Got It Or You Don't When It Comes To Writing Books. And You Tend To Only Get These Things If You Want Them, And Want Them To The Exclusion Of Everything Else.

L.a. Ispolluted. It's Overpopulated. But It Is Very Much Home. It Was Inevitable For Me, The Moving Back. I Was Living In San Francisco, And Joan Broke It Off With Me, And I Needed A Place To Live. I'd Been Divorced. And I Needed To Write Movies And Tv Shows To Earn A Living. Alimony. All That. So I Figured What The Hell, I'll Go Back To L.a.

"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.

Rock And Rollers Can Get You The Youth Buzz, And Younger People Are Fanatical Readers.

Some People Don’t Respond To Civility.

As A Kid, I Sensed History Going On All Around Me, But The Basic Thrust Of It Didn't Move Me.

I Always Cringe When A Male Friend Of Mine, Who's Very Fixated On Women, Puts "compatibility" At The Top Of His List Of Attributes That He Would Be Looking For In A Woman. I Would Replace Compatibility With Dialectic.

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.

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.

History Is A State Of Yearning. I Yearn For Kay Lake Throughout This Entire Thing. There's An Essay I've Written Where I Talked About Living In The Past. There's A Whole Motif In The Book Of Then And Now. And I Lived There.

I Don't Want To Recover From Writing This Book [the Onion]. I Feel Very Poised. I Feel Like I'm With My Mother For The First Time Ever. I Feel Like I've Confronted Her, And The Confrontation Goes On.

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.

America Was Never Innocent. We Popped Our Cherry On The Boat Over And Looked Back With No Regrets. You Can't Ascribe Our Fall From Grace To Any Single Event Or Set Of Circumstances. You Can't Lose What You Lacked At Conception.

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.

Dead People Belong To The Live People Who Claim Them Most Obsessively.

I Have Insane Curiosity As To What Happened In All These Events. I Will Never Know. I'm Not A Researcher. I Don't Possess That Kind Of Mind. I Have A Researcher Who Compiles The Fact Sheets And Chronologies That Allow Me To Write These Big Books Of Mine.

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.

My Guys Are Morally Weak, And They Reach Toward A Tenuous Knowledge Of Self-sacrifice, And Sometimes It's Too Late. I Find That Moving. It's Not A Life I'd Want To Live. But, Then, I'm Not Completely My Books.

Some Men Get The World, Some Men Get Ex-hookers And A Trip To Arizona. You're In With The Former, But My God I Don't Envy The Blood On Your Conscience.

How Did I Change My Life? I Wanted Things. I Wanted Women And I Wanted To Write Books.

Changing My Life

She Quoted A Dead Playwright And Called Me A Bullet With Nothing But A Future. She Understood My Lack Of Self-pity. She Knew Why I Despised Everything That Might Restrict My Forward Momentum. She Knew That Bullets Have No Conscience. They Speed Past Things And Miss Their Marks As Often As They Hit Them.

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American History

Our Shared World Is Humanly Unquantifiable And Ideologically Confused. Which One Of Them Is Capable Of Implementing The Most Recognizable Harm Or Good?

I've Been Tremendously Moved By A Bunch Of Odd Books. Ross Mcdonald Is Very Important To Me. I Love The Lew Archer Books.

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.

If I Wanted To Make Money I Would Have Written Another Novel.

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I Needed To Address That I've Had Some Profound Moral Shifts In My Own Life.

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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.

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Tell Me Anything. Tell Me Everything. Revoke Our Time Apart. Love Me Fierce In Danger.

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L.a.: Come On Vacation, Go Home On Probation.

I'm Getting A Wider Circle Of Fans Now. More Women, More Middle Class People.

And The Only Forms Of Socialism In The World That Were Then Getting Results - Malign Ones, As It Was - Were The Fascist And Soviet Republics. Fascism Is A Form Of Socialism - You Rebuild The Country, You Find A Scapegoat, And You Go From There.

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We Do. Or Re-create The Ones We Have, And Project. My Whole Life Is Projection.

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Closure Is A Preposterous Concept Worthy Of The Worst Aspects Of American Daytime Tv.

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I Was In L.a. In '08. It Was A Cold Saturday Night. I Had Spread My Phone Number Out To A Score Of Women And Was Just Indulging This Sweet, Sad, Elegiac, Bale Loneliness - Don't Tell Me You Haven't Been There.

Where’s Your Sketch Pad?” I Asked. … “i Gave That Up,” Kay Said. “i Wasn’t Very Good, So I Changed My Major.” “to What?” “to Pre-med, Then Psychology, Then English Lit, Then History.” “i Like A Woman Who Knows What She Wants.” Kay Smiled. “so Do I, But I Don’t Know Any.

I Like To Have Fun Out There. I Work Hard, And Then I Get To Cut Loose And Go Out And Tour, And I Enjoy It. I Like To Go Out And Meet The People. I Love To Sell Books.

It Was Easy Not To Think Of My Future; I Didn't Have One.

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.

Every One Of My Books Is Written From The Viewpoint Of Cops, With The Exception Of My Book Killer On The Road, Which Is Written From The Viewpoint Of A Serial Killer.

I Am A Writer. I Could Not Afford To Take 15 Months Off From My Writing Career To Play Detective.

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