James Ellroy Quotes

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

Do you love this story? If you love it, then you've got to write it.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

I love writing. I think writing and directing go hand in hand.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

The creative process; I enjoy thinking up the stories and situations for my books.

I love to read profiles about people, but I'm interested in their processes. I only ever do them for newspapers that I love.

On Saturdays, I get up early, spread out my notes from the week on the kitchen table, and create stories from them.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

I enjoy storytelling. I like to write it, I like to direct it, I like to act in it, I like to produce it. I like to be around storytellers. That's what excites me.

As hard as you try to write a good script and you have great intentions, this alchemy has to occur.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I'm going to learn, if I'm going to research, it's probably going to lead me to writing a novel.

Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.

I write a story in my head. I see the story like a movie.

If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation. In this play, I had a strong main character and it involved some creation around him. That's what I like about adapting that particular play because I added some maneuvering space as a scriptwriter to invent my own things.

I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.

I love worldbuilding. It's as much fun for me as writing itself. It's like a hobby of mine.

One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.

If it turns out that we're doing proper science from time to time, it just happens to be that that's the most efficient way of doing it. We go into each of these stories with an open mind, and one of the great things about how the show works is that we're not approaching it from a doctoral point of view, we're just trying to see what happens.