James Ellroy

Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.

I have a very intense marriage.

I'm clenched down, I'm locked in on it, which is my general approach to life.