117 Quotes by Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis, born on March 7, 1964, is an American author known for his provocative and controversial novels that explore themes of alienation, materialism, and the darker side of American society. Ellis rose to prominence with his debut novel, "Less Than Zero," which delved into the hedonistic and disillusioned lives of affluent Los Angeles youth. His subsequent works, including "American Psycho" and "The Rules of Attraction," further solidified his reputation as a bold and daring writer.
Ellis's writing style, characterized by his unflinching depiction of violence, sex, and social satire, has sparked both acclaim and controversy. His ability to capture the zeitgeist of a generation and expose the underbelly of society has made him a polarizing figure in the literary world. Whether praised for his searing cultural critiques or criticized for his graphic content, Bret Easton Ellis's novels have left an indelible mark on contemporary literature, challenging readers to confront uncomfortable truths about modern life.
Bret Easton Ellis Quotes
We buy balloons, we let them go.
The better you look, the more you see.
I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.
Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.
No one ever likes the right person. (Meaning)
Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?
Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?
But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.
Eventually everyone has to hit the dark side of life - Someone doesn't like you, someone doesn't like your work, someone doesn't love you back.. people die. What we have is a generation who are super-confident and super-positive about things, but when the least bit of darkness enters their lives, they're paralyzed.
I like the idea of a writer being haunted by his own creation, especially if the writer resents the way the character defines him.
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
What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.
Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead.
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.
The snowy owl has eyes that look just like mine, especially when it widens them. And while I stand there, staring at it, lowering my sunglasses, something unspoken passes between me and the bird - there's this weird kind of tension, a bizarre pressure, that fuels the following, which starts, happens, ends, very quickly.
Disintegration---I'm taking it in stride.
A great numb feeling washes over me as I let go of the past and look forward to the future. Pretend to be a vampire. I don't really need to pretend, because it's who I am, an emotional vampire. I've just come to expect it. Vampires are real. That I was born this way. That I feed off of other people's real emotions. Search for this night's prey. Who will it be?
Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or another, working through my feelings at the time.
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.
The seeds of love have taken hold and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone.
When the going gets tough, the tough go drinking.
By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world.
Disappear Here. The syringe fills with blood. You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters. Wonder if he's for sale. People are afraid to merge. To merge.
Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever.
All of my books come from pain.
Not being able to find meaning can be just as powerful as finding meaning.
If you're alone nothing bad can happen to you.
My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone.
After a while you learn that everything stops.
You learn to move on without the people you love.
There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.
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.
I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.
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.
Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.
A child should never even think about being a "good son." A parent decides that fate for the child. The parent encourages that. Not the child himself. And the "perfect dad"? I shudder at thinking what that may be.
Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.
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.
Why would I care what other people are thinking? I don't care what an audience thinks of me.
Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.
I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)
No one will ever know anyone. We just have to deal with each other. You're not ever gonna know me.
I think we've all lost some kind of feeling.
Do you wear a diaphragm everywhere you go?' I want to scream, but stop myself because the idea really excites me.
People are afraid to merge.
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.
I wasn't acting on passion. I was simply acting.
How could she ever understand that there isn't any way could be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to?
I'm on the verge of tears by the time we arrive at Pastels since I'm positive we won't get seated but the table is good, and relief that is almost tidal in scope washes over me in an awesome wave.
There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.
I want to take you away from this," I say, motioning around the kitchen, spastic. "From sushi and elves and... STUFF.
But this road doesn't go anywhere,” I told him. “That doesn't matter.” “What does?” I asked, after a little while. “Just that we're on it, dude,” he said.
Price. You're priceless.
History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad.
I totally relate to Tom Cruise. He's not crazy, it's just the litany of the mid-life crisis.
I went to college in Vermont, and then stayed in the East Coast.
I think a lot of snowflakes are alike...and I think a lot of people are alike too.
Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.
That's how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That's how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That's how I became the boy who wouldn't save a friend. That's how I became the boy who couldn't love the girl.
There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.
And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea.
People just... disappear," he says. "The Earth just opens up and swallows people," I say, some what sadly, checking my Rolex. "Eerie." Kimball yawns, stretching. "Really eerie." "Ominous." I nod my agreement. "It's just"- he sights, exasperated- "futile.
The Smiths are singing and someone says "Turn that gay angst music off.
Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn't a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don't know. I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility.
No one is drawn to writing about being happy or feelings of joy.
Are you as much of a criminal if you don't act when there's a crime taking place in front of you as you are one of the participants? That was something that I was thinking about a lot because there are many moments in 'Less Than Zero' where horrific things happen and Clay could do something about them, but his passivity stops him.
People can get accustomed to anything, right? Habit does things to people.
I write books to relieve myself of pain. That's the prime motivator to write. Period.
Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.
I've forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where.
I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.
Hello, Halberstam," Owen says, walking by. Hello, Owen," I say, admiring the way he's styled and slicked back his hair, with a part so even and sharp it... devastates me and I make a mental note to ask him where he purchases his hair-care products, which kind of mousse he uses, my final guesses after mulling over the possibilities being Ten-X.
It's the rare book that's able to transport you in a way that a movie does.
Yes. Yes I am. I am a completely demented misogynist.
I feel like I'm not smart enough to answer the questions I'm asked.
I've been accused of being very vain about my apathy.
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.
Adjust my dreams for me.
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
There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.
what's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.
I am gripped by an existential panic.
Rock 'n' roll. Deal with it.
I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.
I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.
Everyone I know who is successful has issues with their father, regardless of whether it was sports or business or entertainment.
It's because you're always fighting sentiment. You're fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way.
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.
I do not feel I have a legacy to protect.
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.
Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.
What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest. 'What do you do?' 'What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?' 'Why not?' She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams. 'Because... I don't know,' she sighs. I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.
What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists?
My pain is constant and sharp...this confession has meant nothing
At Columbus Circle, a juggler wearing a trench cloak and top hat, who is usually at this location afternoons and who calls himself Stretch Man, performs in front of a small, uninterested crowd; though I smell prey, and he seems worthy of my wrath, I move on in search of a less dorky target. Though if he'd been a mime, odds are he'd already be dead.
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.
If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies.
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."
I laugh maniacally, then take a deep breath and touch my chest- expecting a heart to be thumping quickly, impatiently, but there's nothing there, not even a beat.
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.
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.
What keeps me interested--and it always does--is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?
If you start looking at movies on a moral level - "I don't like that, that hurts, that's mean, that's bad" - then I don't even want to talk to you. Or like, someone that says "I don't like science-fiction movies," or "I don't want to sit through a Western," or "I don't like violence in movies," then I completely tune out.
I think the books are the books. They were conceived as books. They weren't conceived as movies. When I write scripts, that's an idea and a situation that I think is a really good idea for a movie. When I'm writing a book, I'm not thinking, "Oh, this would be a great movie." This would be a very interesting book. And I think the books are things that cannot really be adapted into another medium.
I learned that you really don't have any control as a writer. Waah, waah, waah. Big deal. 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. As someone who's just writing scripts, you just kind of have to shrug. I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general. It is what it is.
You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.
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.
Exploitation is a harsh word, I know that, but on a certain level, to me that is the central Hollywood story.
I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.
And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention
The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.
I'm into, oh murders and executions mostly. It depends.
Fear never shows up and the party ends early.
I'm not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he's not in the mood and doesn't feel the juice. I don't think discipline equals creativity.
Completely committed to adapting 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. This is not a joke. Christian Grey and Ana: potentially great cinematic characters.
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.
Women aren't very bright," Rip says. "Studies have been done.
― Bret Easton Ellis Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
