Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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
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
She staggers over to the bathroom door and grabs the edge of it to balance herself and blood starts running down her legs in thin rivulets and when she lifts up the robe we both can see her underwear soaked with blood and she pulls it off, panicking, and suddenly a huge gush of blood expels itself from beneath the robe, splashing all over the bathroom floor. She gasps, a thick noise comes out of her throat and she doubles over, grabbing her stomach, then she screams. Looking surprised and still clutching her stomach, she vomits will staggering backwards, collapsing onto the bathroom floor. There are strands of tissue hanging out of her.

Bret Easton Ellis
I want to take you away from this," I say, motioning around the kitchen, spastic. "From sushi and elves and... STUFF.

Bret Easton Ellis
The seeds of love have taken hold and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone.

Bret Easton Ellis
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.

Bret Easton Ellis
When I was bullied: you manned-up. You learned something. You realized: I'm not getting the gold star. You realized: you lose. Deal with it.

Bret Easton Ellis
Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

Bret Easton Ellis
Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.

Bret Easton Ellis
I reread that book in the summer of '03.... And I hadn't looked at that book either since '91. And I was dreading it. I thought it was going to be a really terrible novel. Everything everyone had ever said about it was going to be true.... And I started reading it... and I was surprised. It was good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. Not nearly as weighted down with the importance that I thought I was investing it with. I found it really fast-moving. I found it really funny. And I liked it a lot. The violence was... it made my toes curl. I really freaked out. I couldn't believe how violent it was. It was truly upsetting. I had to steel myself to reread those passages.

Bret Easton Ellis
I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don't remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is 'Disappear Here' and even though it's probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.

Bret Easton Ellis
Women aren't very bright," Rip says. "Studies have been done.

Bret Easton Ellis
I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation.

Bret Easton Ellis
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.

Bret Easton Ellis
By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world.

Bret Easton Ellis
So… Kimball looks at his book helplessly. There's nothing you can tell me about Paul Owen? Well. I sigh. He led what I suppose was an orderly life, I guess. Really stumped, I offer, He...ate a balanced diet.

Bret Easton Ellis
There's no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I've started drinking my own urine.

Bret Easton Ellis
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.

Bret Easton Ellis
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.

Bret Easton Ellis
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
'As a general rule you shouldn't expect too much from people darling,' and then I kiss her on the cheek.

Bret Easton Ellis
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
I keep feeling that people are becoming less human and more animalistic. They seem to think less and feel less so that everyone is operating on a very primitive level. I wonder what you and I will see in our lifetimes. It seems so hopeless yet we must keep on trying... I guess we can't escape being a product of the times, can we?

Bret Easton Ellis
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 discipline equals creativity.

Bret Easton Ellis
How could she ever understand that there isn't any way could be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to?

Bret Easton Ellis
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
History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad.

Bret Easton Ellis
Her taste in music haunted my memory and I had to stop at Tower Records on the Upper West Side to buy ninety dollars' worth of rap CDs but, as expected, I'm at a loss: [...] voices uttering ugly words like digit, pudding, chunk.

Bret Easton Ellis