Top 100 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes
#1. I remain a fan of my friend Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho.' I think as a book about New York in the '80s it was pretty excellent.
Jay McInerney
#2. My publisher had mailed [Bret Easton Ellis] Richard Yates. And when I talked to him he said he had read all my prose books. And he said something like, "You got a lot of mileage out of Dakota Fanning."
Tao Lin
#3. I think Bret Easton Ellis has said that he doesn't completely identify with his characters. And I think he has referred to them as immoral before.
Tao Lin
#4. Brands are useful ways of short-handing practically anything - look at the way Tom Wolfe first used brand name lists to sharpen up a character and a situation. Look at the most brand-referenced novel, Bret Easton Ellis's 'Glamorama.'
Peter York
#5. Even the successful 1985 Bret Easton Ellis book (and 1987 film) Less Than Zero, which tracks the falling from grace of wealthy Los Angeles teens, could not be imagined with the logically equivalent title: Negative.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#6. I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."
Bret Easton Ellis
#7. I know Bret Easton Ellis has said he has some amount of empathy for every character he has written about, though, so maybe I am similar to him in terms of that. I'm not sure what he thinks exactly.
Tao Lin
#8. I like Bret Easton Ellis' sense of humor. I feel like mine is sometimes similar to his. And how his characters sometimes seem really confused in a humorous manner. I like that. And I have that sometimes in my characters.
Tao Lin
#9. Sometimes I would take Nietzsche or something. And I wouldn't read it, but more just scan the words. Sometimes I would get whatever the popular thing at the time was. I don't know, something like Bret Easton Ellis. It was just a very random, inefficient education.
John Brandon
#10. Bret Easton Ellis is a social satirist; I consider myself aligned with how he does things. Bret doesn't write about that which he loves about the world, he writes about what disgusts him. You'd be a disturbed individual if you came out and said, 'I love these characters'.
Roger Avary
#11. I wouldn't think of my characters' moralities at all. And I think I identify fully with every main character I've written about and would say that I am them pretty much. So in terms of that I don't think I'm similar to Bret Easton Ellis .
Tao Lin
#12. I passed what I thought was a Halloween parade, which was disorienting since I was fairly sure this was May. When I stopped on the corner of Sixteenth Street and made a closer inspection it turned out to be something called a "Gay Pride Parade," which made my stomach turn.
Bret Easton Ellis
#13. My mind reeling with the concept that a human being, a man, could feel pride over sodomizing another man,
Bret Easton Ellis
#14. Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.
Bret Easton Ellis
#15. Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.
Bret Easton Ellis
#16. I think in life, there are certain choices you make that are timeless and universal, and don't necessarily have anything to do with the particulars of a certain decade.
Bret Easton Ellis
#17. I think the '80s created me, in a way, when I look back on that time, but I don't necessarily think that a lot of my choices, and a lot of things that I did, and a lot of things that happened to me - or I let happen to me - were about that decade.
Bret Easton Ellis
#20. I've forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where.
Bret Easton Ellis
#21. I say, staring at her, quite clearly but muffled by "Pump Up the Volume" and the crowd, "You are a fucking ugly bitch I want to stab to death and play around with your blood," but I'm smiling. I
Bret Easton Ellis
#22. It's like my characters, all my men are Dad and me in a mess; all my female characters are smart and hopeful, like Mom just trying to make the best of things.
Bret Easton Ellis
#23. Hope E. L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.
Bret Easton Ellis
#24. But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.
Bret Easton Ellis
#26. She's simply another girl who has gotten by on her looks - her currency in this world - and it will not be fun to watch her grow old.
Bret Easton Ellis
#27. You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.
Bret Easton Ellis
#28. Unless you're the director on the movie, or putting up the money for the movie, you really don't have a lot of control.
Bret Easton Ellis
#29. I guess the consolation is that she's not going to be beautiful forever," he says. "But I'd like to be with her before that happens.
Bret Easton Ellis
#30. By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world.
Bret Easton Ellis
#31. I'm also staring at the fortune cookie. Its got a lot of blood on it and I shrug and say, as jovially as I can, Oh, you know me.
Bret Easton Ellis
#32. You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you
Bret Easton Ellis
#34. I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings.
Bret Easton Ellis
#36. Why not? Give me one good reason why we shouldn't get married.
Because trying to fuck you is like trying to french-kiss a very ... small and ... lively gerbil? With braces?
Bret Easton Ellis
#38. Everyone I know who is successful has issues with their father, regardless of whether it was sports or business or entertainment.
Bret Easton Ellis
#40. Is that your real name?
Does it really matter?
It makes me wonder what else is not real.
Bret Easton Ellis
#41. Descansado," he tells me.
"What does that mean?"
"Descansado," Rip says. "It means 'take it easy,'" he whispers, clutching the child next to him.
"Yeah?"
"It means relax.
Bret Easton Ellis
#42. Before I leave, the Eurotrash girl tells me she likes my gazelleskin wallet. I tell her I would like to tit-fuck her and then maybe cut her arms off, but the music, George Michael singing "Faith," is too loud and she can't hear me. Back upstairs I find Patricia where I left her,
Bret Easton Ellis
#43. But ... what about us? What about the past?" she asks blankly.
"The past isn't real. it's just a dream," I say. "Don't mention the past.
Bret Easton Ellis
#44. I can't disagree. I laugh weakly, walking him to the door. As he leaves I'm wondering and not wondering what happens in the world of Tim Price, which is really the world of most of us: big ideas, guy stuff, boy meets the world, boy gets it.
Bret Easton Ellis
#46. I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.
Bret Easton Ellis
#47. You should never mistake affection for ... passion," I warn her. "It can be ... not good. It can ... get you into, well, trouble.
Bret Easton Ellis
#48. I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care.
Bret Easton Ellis
#50. I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.
Bret Easton Ellis
#51. She sits before me, sullen but hopeful, characterless, about to dissolve into tears. I squeeze her hand back, moved, no, touched by her ignorance of evil. She has one more test to pass.
Do you own a briefcase? I ask her, swallowing.
Bret Easton Ellis
#53. It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never Let's not get the bottle of Cristal.
Bret Easton Ellis
#55. And as the elevator descents, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even father down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst
Bret Easton Ellis
#56. Open the hood of a car and it will tell you something about the people who designed it, is just one of many phrases I'm tortured by.
Bret Easton Ellis
#57. History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad.
Bret Easton Ellis
#58. The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.
Bret Easton Ellis
#60. And the sun, a planet on fire, gradually rises over Manhattan, another sunrise, and soon the night turns into day so fast its like some kind of optical illusion ...
Bret Easton Ellis
#61. No I'm not," I whisper to myself. "I'm a fucking evil psychopath.
Bret Easton Ellis
#62. Hip, I murmur, remembering last night, how I lost it completely in a stall at Nell's
my mouth foaming, all I could think about were insects, lots of insects, and running at pigeons, foaming at the mouth and running at pigeons.
Bret Easton Ellis
#63. And it doesnt really matter if intelligence exists because it is really about the look, the idea of a girl like this, the promise of sex. It's all about the lure.
Bret Easton Ellis
#64. If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.
Bret Easton Ellis
#66. Haven't we outgrown all this tired irony? Weren't we supposed to give up acting twenty-two forever?
Bret Easton Ellis
#68. He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all.
Bret Easton Ellis
#69. You are a fucking ugly bitch I want to stab to death and play around with your blood, but I'm smiling.
Bret Easton Ellis
#70. The only cheese I have in the apartment is a wedge of Brie in the refrigerator and before leaving I place the entire slice--it's a really big rat--along with a sun-dried tomato and a sprinkling of dill, delicately on the trap, setting it.
Bret Easton Ellis
#71. From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams.
Bret Easton Ellis
#72. And it struck me then, that I liked Sean because he looked, well, slutty. A boy who had been around. A boy who couldn't remember if he was Catholic or not.
Bret Easton Ellis
#73. I am a ghost to this man, I'm thinking. I am something unreal, something not quite tangible, yet still an obstacle of sorts and he nods, gets back on the phone, resumes speaking in a dialect totally alien to me.
Bret Easton Ellis
#74. I'm resourceful," Price is saying. "I'm creative, I'm young, unscrupulous, highly motivate, highly skilled. In essence what I'm saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I'm an asset
Bret Easton Ellis
#76. Everything suddenly seems displaced, subtle gradations erase borders, but it's more forceful than that.
Bret Easton Ellis
#78. But hey, she works in a video rental store and since it's such a demanding high-powered profession her bitchy behavior is completely reasonable, right? The
Bret Easton Ellis
#79. The Smiths are singing and someone says Turn that gay angst music off.
Bret Easton Ellis
#80. When I flush the toilet in my bathroom, it becomes stopped up with Kleenex, and blood clouds the water and I put down the lid, because there's nothing else for me to do.
Bret Easton Ellis
#81. Scientists peered into data and concluded that we should all be worried.
-Lunar planet
Bret Easton Ellis
#82. What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists?
Bret Easton Ellis
#83. I had to put this slim volume back into my bookshelf and drink a J&B on the rocks, followed by two Xanax, to recover from the effort.
Bret Easton Ellis
#84. Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.
Bret Easton Ellis
#85. I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind man's vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet again that I was a tourist here.
Bret Easton Ellis
#86. How is your father?" she asks disinterestedly.
"A contrivance," I mutter. "A plot device.
Bret Easton Ellis
#87. Listen," I say, pushing my chair in. "I just want everyone to know that I'm pro-family and anti-drug. Excuse me.
Bret Easton Ellis
#88. Baby, when you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to say live and let live. You know you did, you know you did, you know you did.
Bret Easton Ellis
#89. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead.
Bret Easton Ellis
#90. This is laid down with a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince of Michael Jackson
or any other black artist of the recent years for that matter
has come up with.
Bret Easton Ellis
#92. I had no idea that 'Less Than Zero' was going to be read by anyone outside of Los Angeles, and it's - believe me, as the writer of the book I'm somewhat amused and intrigued by the idea that 25 years later it's still out and people are still reading it.
Bret Easton Ellis
#93. Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?
Bret Easton Ellis
#94. No one will ever know anyone. We just have to deal with each other. You're not ever gonna know me.
Bret Easton Ellis
#95. There's no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I've started drinking my own urine.
Bret Easton Ellis
#96. The numbing lists of things you were supposed to have as an American to make you happy, which ultimately, of course, don't. Those aren't the things that make you happy.
Bret Easton Ellis
#97. Why do I sense hostility on your part, Patrick?" she asks softly, then sips her wine.
"Maybe because I'm hostile," I spit out. "Maybe because you sense this.
Bret Easton Ellis
#98. Life is full of endless possibilities. I tried valiantly not to choke on the beer nuts I was chewing while she gushed this kidney stone of wisdom,
Bret Easton Ellis
#99. Why not end up with her? floats into my line of vision. An answer: she has a better body than most other girls I know. Another one: everyone is interchangeable anyway.
Bret Easton Ellis
#100. I feel like I'm not smart enough to answer the questions I'm asked.
Bret Easton Ellis
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