Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

No one will ever know anyone. We just have to deal with each other. You're not ever gonna know me.

Bret Easton Ellis
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
I've forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where.

Bret Easton Ellis
People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.

Bret Easton Ellis
It's definitely the book that I can tell—I don't know if other people can tell but I can tell as a writer–-is probably the most divisive that I've written. It has an equal number of detractors as it does fans. It doesn't really hold true with the other books. It was the one that took the longest to write, and the one that seemed the most important at the time. It's an unwieldy book... I like it.

Bret Easton Ellis
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
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.

Bret Easton Ellis
'I just had my makeup done, so you can't make me cry.'

Bret Easton Ellis
A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety. It's as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there... is... no... key.

Bret Easton Ellis
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.

Bret Easton Ellis
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.

Bret Easton Ellis
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
You can argue that writers are notoriously wrong about what they think is their best work.

Bret Easton Ellis
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.

Bret Easton Ellis
... and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin's room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or Junior and usually somestimes at her boyfriend's place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N. Y. U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed to Get Screwed party, or a townie.

Bret Easton Ellis
I could stay living in this city if they just installed Blaupunkts in the cabs.

Bret Easton Ellis
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...

Bret Easton Ellis
What keeps me interested—and it always does—is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?

Bret Easton Ellis
Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?

Bret Easton Ellis
The stars are real.
The future is that mountain.

Bret Easton Ellis
Do you know what Ed Gein said about women?" [...] "'When I see a pretty girl walking down the street I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and treat her right.'" I stop finish my J&B in one swallow. "What does the other part of him think?" Hamlin asks tentatively. "What her head would look like on a stick

Bret Easton Ellis
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
I'm Christian Bale", Russel, says, taking [her hand].
"Oh right," she says. "Yeah, I thought I recognized you. You're the actor.

Bret Easton Ellis
"I hear today's college women are 'prodigious.'"
"Prodigious? Is that what you heard?"
"Well, I read it in a magazine. It was something I wanted to believe."
"The Jayster. Always a dreamer."

Bret Easton Ellis
I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.

Bret Easton Ellis
And," Price adds, smiling, "if another round of Bellinis comes within a twenty-foot radius of our table we are going to set the maitre d' on fire. So you know, warn him.

Bret Easton Ellis
The Smiths are singing and someone says "Turn that gay angst music off.

Bret Easton Ellis
I think a lot of snowflakes are alike...and I think a lot of people are alike too.

Bret Easton Ellis
My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone.

Bret Easton Ellis
I read it for the first time in about 20 years this year–-recently. It wasn't so bad. I get it. I get fan mail now from people who weren't really born yet when the book came out. I don't think it's a perfect book by any means, but it's valid. I get where it comes from. I get what it is. I know that sounds so ambiguous. It's sort of out of my hands and it has its reputation so what can you do about it? There's a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written. Overall, I was pretty shocked. It was pretty good writing for someone who was 19. I was pretty surprised by the level of writing.

Bret Easton Ellis