I Almost Had An Intransigent Mental Spirit.

Noir Is Dead For Me Because Historically, I Think It's A Simple View. I've Taken It As Far As It Can Go. I Think I've Expanded On It A Great Deal, Taken It Further Than Any Other American Novelist.

Anything Less Than Total Candor Was Bullshit. I Owed That To My Readers, I Owed That To Myself, And I Owed That Most Specifically To My Mother. I've Had Some Thrilling Moments In My 18-year Literary Career To This Point, And Nothing Comes Close To Giving Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, The Farm Girl From Tunnel City, Wisconsin, To The World.

I Am A Master Of Fiction. I Am Also The Greatest Crime Novelist Who Ever Lived. I Am To The Crime Novel In Specific What Tolstoy Is To The Russian Novel And What Beethoven Is To Music.

I'm Trying To Be Less Bombastic. I Love My Books. I Think I've Done Things Nobody Else Has Done.

History Is A State Of Yearning. I Yearn For Kay Lake Throughout This Entire Thing. There's An Essay I've Written Where I Talked About Living In The Past. There's A Whole Motif In The Book Of Then And Now. And I Lived There.