Life & Wisdom Quote by James Ellroy

Ellroy is admitting that the “author persona” isn’t a side effect of success; it’s part of the product, and it has to be managed like any other moving piece of the brand. The line turns publicity on its head: interviews aren’t a victory lap or a dutiful promotional chore, they’re an arena where the story about the work gets fought over in real time. “Myth” is doing heavy lifting here, suggesting that acclaim doesn’t merely reward art, it manufactures a legend around it - a legend that can harden into something false, sentimental, or just too neat for the kind of hardboiled ugliness Ellroy trades in.

The verb “puncture” is classic Ellroy: violent, tactile, anti-reverent. He’s wary of the ways critics and fans sanitize a writer into an inspirational narrative (genius, tortured soul, lone craftsman), and he’s just as wary of his own temptation to lean into that narrative because it sells. The subtext is a power struggle: if you don’t deflate the myth, it inflates you - it dictates how people read the books, what they expect next, what questions get asked, what truths get ignored.

“Refine it” complicates the macho iconoclasm. He’s not pretending he can escape mythmaking; he’s saying he’d rather edit the legend than be edited by it. In a media culture that rewards easy origin stories and quotable identities, Ellroy is describing interviews as revision sessions: not of the manuscript, but of the public meaning attached to it.