"Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose."
— James Ellroy

"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."
— James Ellroy

"Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man."
— James Ellroy

""The left one's the hospital, the right one's death. The right one steals your life while the left steals your breath. These hands are bad juju and the bad boogaloo, they're the teeth of the demon as he slides down the flue.""
— James Ellroy

"To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning."
— James Ellroy

"It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one."
— James Ellroy

"Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good? "
— James Ellroy (Blood's A Rover)

"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."
— James Ellroy (My Dark Places)

"I am the son of a murdered woman—anybody who'd call my books misogynistic is, frankly, out of their fucking mind.
"
— James Ellroy