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 dr….

L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation..

We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection..

I learn things late-and only the hard way..

Anything less than total candor was bullshit. I owed that to my readers, I owed that to myself, and I owed that most specifically to my mother. I've ….

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..

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,….

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 i….

How did I change my life? I wanted things. I wanted women and I wanted to write books..

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….

In the time just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Perfidia opens, we were pre-psychologized. There were no concepts of identity, no politics ….

It's all sex for me. Politics is sex. Race is sex. It's the novel. It's the novel!.

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'….

[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people..

Classical music fulfills for me the function of narrative. I spend 90 minutes a day listening to symphonic music - Beethoven to Bartók - some chamber….

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 conscienc….

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 l….

I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things..

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, ta….

My mother and I will continue on some level that I havent determined yet. I think my mothers a great character, and I have to say that giving my moth….

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 ….