A handful of James Ellroy quotes from his AV Club interview.

[on his new memoir, The Hilliker Curse]

...no one wants to read a candy-assed narrative discursive parenthetical-filled memoir indigenous to one human being. Memoirs must explicate larger spiritual and social issues.

[on why he dates women who don't agree with his politics]

I'm not looking for ease in relationships with women; 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 looking for in a woman. I would replace compatibility with dialectic...But I'm way past the idea of using ideology or political view as a gauge of human character. I simply don't believe it.

[on being a conservative]

There are people, cultural critics, who see no distinction between being a conservative, and going out and murdering civil-rights leaders and liberal politicians. And that's their faulty dilemma that they will have to deal with.

[just a great curmudgeonly rant]

I'm older; I have a great love of the English parlance. I can't stand dipshit, tattooed, laquered, varnished, depilatoried younger people talking their stupid shit, stage-sighing, saying "It's like, I'm like, whatever," and talking in horrible cliches, rolling their eyes when they disapprove of something. I saw that the culture was pandering more and more to this kid demographic. And in the course of driving from here to there, I began to see more and more billboards for vile misogynistic horror films, white-trash reality-TV shows, neck-biting fucked-up vampire flicks, and stoned-out teenage-boy pratfall comedies. Bad drama, bad comedy, that portrayed life preposterously, frivolously, and ironically, and that got to me. So I would drive here, there, and elsewhere through residential neighbourhoods in order to avoid billboards.

[his take on the recession]

I trust my morality in the narrow path I trek through the world as I work. I've been very much enjoying the financial flatline--and divorce, frankly, and alimony--because I dig struggle. I love to fight. And I've enjoyed the financial necessity of going out and finding work in what is to many a dwindling marketplace, but to me seems to be an ever-expanding marketplace.