James Ellroy Quotes

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

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.

I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, although I don't ape his style.

I've always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That's how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.

What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers.

Ross McDonald had a greater influence on me than any other writer. His style of writing, the repeated theme of the past coming out to grab somebody, that's very attractive to me as a reader and, now, as a writer.

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

It's possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it's possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir.

George V. Higgins's 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' (1970) added an extra literary layer to the con novel; James Crumley's 'The Last Good Kiss' (1978) influenced countless writers and will be remembered forever for its opening line, quoted often in obituaries of the author.

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

James Cain was saddled with being called the father of hardboiled fiction. Apparently, he didn't like this saddle.

I wasn't that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson - I loved all his books.

I particular enjoy the crime writer, Walter Ellis Mosley. He does a series of Chandler-esque detective stories.

I've read a thousand private-eye novels.

I was well under the spell of the old Gold Medal Crime novels when I wrote 'Savage Season,' and I wanted to write a modern version of that. I had tried the same thing with 'Cold in July,' and I wanted to give it another go.

Dorothy B. Hughes - there's a robust elegance to her writing that I keep responding to again and again. I've read her novel 'In a Lonely Place' about eight or nine times.

'The Long Goodbye' is one book I like to read over and over again, and it was an enormous inspiration for 'All The Wrong Questions'.

I love Elmore Leonard. To me, True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I was digging for stuff in a used bookstore, and I came upon 'Little Sister.' I fell in love with Chandler that night. I fell right down the rabbit hole of crime fiction.

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.

I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

I adore Kate Atkinson, her literary as well as her crime output.

The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society - nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.