James Ellroy Quotes

It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.

I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do - the actual act of writing - turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they'll come, but by that time you won't be thinking in terms of money or fame.

It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.

I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote for money. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money.

The thing that's important for me to focus on is the balancing of the tension between satisfying myself and satisfying an audience, and making something that I think is good and funny, worthwhile, small-"i" important, versus something that's going to do well.

I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.

Before I studied story, I was trying to write a novel, and it was terrible. It wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't figure out what I was trying to do. It was really hard; much harder than I thought it was going to be. Now that I've studied story, I think I'd have a different approach and maybe I could actually get it done.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

I stay away from the writing part because I think that if it sticks, it sticks. You just know it. The stuff that doesn't stick, goes away. The stuff that propels you forward, you can see it in your partner's eyes.

I don't think writing stops until the film is out. In the edit, it's another draft. [The script] is the food for set, and then the set is food for the edit, and the edit is food for the screen. It's constant, and this is just the first stage of it.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

From my vantage point in writing a story, I can't and don't and have no interest in thinking about the level of sophistication of the audience. I can only think about what interests me, and maybe what I would want to see if I were watching the movie. To me, that's the key to writing something that's not pandering.

I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting.

As much as there is joy in writing, there's always the little bit of terror to keep you on edge, on your toes. It is a strange way to occupy yourself - to enjoy your life on a daily basis. There is no guarantee that something great is going to come next.