Easton Ellis Quotes & Sayings

With Taipei Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation. — 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

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

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. — Bret Easton Ellis

How can I tell McDermott that this is a very disjointed time of my life and that I notice the walls have been painted a bright, almost painful white and under the glare of the fluorescent lights they seem to pulse and glow. — Bret Easton Ellis

I have a lunch meeting with Cliff Huxtable at The Four Seasons in twenty minutes anyway," I lie, standing up. "I have to go too. — Bret Easton Ellis

The director mentions the whispers about Clifton's sexual orientation, a supposed gig on a porn site years ago, a rumor about a very famous actor and a tryst in Santa Barbara and Clifton's denial in a Rolling Stone cover story about the very famous actor's new movie which Clifton had a small part in: 'We're so into girls it's ridiculous. — Bret Easton Ellis

Things
changing, failing apart, fading, another year, a few more
moves, a hard person who doesn't give a fuck, a boredom so
monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by
people you don't even know that it requires you to lose any
sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations
so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever
matching them. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

Nothing. Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing, I tell her. — Bret Easton Ellis

The things I could do to you with a coat hanger. — Bret Easton Ellis

At the casting sessions it was all boys and though I wasn't exactly bored I didn't need to be there, and songs constantly floating in the car keep commenting on everything neutral encased within the windshield's frame ( ... one time you were blowing young ruffians ... sung over the digital billboard on Sunset advertising the new Pixar movie) and the fear builds into a muted fury and then has no choice but to melt away into a simple and addictive sadness. — 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

God, the name Susan is so ugly. It reminds me of the word sinus. — Bret Easton Ellis

Keep everything young and soft, keep everything on the surface, even with the knowledge that the surface fades and can't be held together forever - take advantage before the expiration date appears in the nearing distance. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

Yes. Yes I am. I am a completely demented misogynist. — 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

A vast and abandoned world laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, a view that confirmed you were much more alone than you thought you were, a view that inspired the flickering thoughts of suicide. — Bret Easton Ellis

Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being - flesh, blood, skin, hair - but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why - I couldn't put my finger on it. — Bret Easton Ellis

There are so many things Blair doesn't get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would always be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? Had she ever cried because she hated someone so much? Had she ever craved betrayal to the point where she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it? Could she locate the moment she went dead inside? Does she remember the year it took to become that way? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away - I now want to explain all these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I'm afraid of people. — Bret Easton Ellis

While walking back to the highway I stop, choke back a sob, my throat tightens. "I just want to..." Facing the skyline, through all the baby talk, I murmur, "keep the game going." As I stand, frozen in position, an old woman emerges behind a Threepenny Opera poster at a deserted bus stop and she's homeless and begging, hobbling over, her face covered with sores that look like bugs, holding out a shaking red hand. "Oh will you please go away?" I sigh. She tells me to get a haircut. — Bret Easton Ellis

And later when we got into the car, he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end. "Where are we going?" I asked. "I don't know" he said "just driving". "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. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

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 Piece and Piece 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

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. — Bret Easton Ellis

Her need is so immense that you become surrounded by it; this need is so enormous that you realize you can actually control it, and I know this because I've done it before. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

did another line and believed him because it is easier to move through the motions than not to. — Bret Easton Ellis

But we can't ignore our social needs either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women's freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in popular music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people. — Bret Easton Ellis

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour. — Bret Easton Ellis

The fact that....you categorize everything as either sexist, or racist, or homophobic, whether it is or not, and therefore harmful to you and you just can't take it, is a kind of mania, a delusion, a psychosis that we have been coddling, encouraging people to think that life should be a smooth utopia built only for them and their fragile sensibility. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality. — Bret Easton Ellis

You can disappear here without knowing it. — Bret Easton Ellis

There are some guys sitting at tables who all look at this one gorgeous girl, longingly, hoping for at least one dance or a blow job in Daddy's car and there are all these girls, looking indifferent or bored, smoking clove cigarettes, all of them or at least most of them staring at one blond-haired boy standing in the back with sunglasses on. Julian — Bret Easton Ellis

If you're going to be a narcissistic schmuck, kid, don't bother studying Faulkner. Go straight to Brett Easton Ellis. He's the role model you need. — Arinn Dembo

Adjust my dreams for me. — Bret Easton Ellis

To me she looks like a big black ant - a big black ant in an original Christian Lacroix - eating a urinal cake and I almost start laughing, but I also want to keep her at ease. I don't want her to get second thoughts about finishing the urinal cake. But she can't eat any more and with only two bites taken, pretending to be full, she pushes the tainted plate away, and at this moment I start feeling strange. Even though I marveled at her eating that thing, it also makes me sad and suddenly I'm reminded that no matter how satisfying it was to see Evelyn eating something I, and countless others, had pissed on, in the end the displeasure it caused her was at my expense - it's an anticlimax, a futile excuse to put up with her for three hours. — Bret Easton Ellis

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

This is reality, and as my loathsome brother Sean would say, I have to deal with it. The — Bret Easton Ellis

She laughs and looks out the window and I think for a minute that she's going to start to cry. I'm standing by the door and I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get her away from it, so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like 'I think we've all lost some sort of feeling. — Bret Easton Ellis

But I don't want to wear a condom because I don't feel anything," and she says calmly ... glaring at me,"If you don't use one you're not going to feel anything anyway. — Bret Easton Ellis

Did I ever tell you that I want to wear a big yellow smiley-face mask and then put on the CD version of Bobby McFerrin's 'Don't Worry, Be Happy' and then take a girl and a dog - a collie, a chow, a sharpei, it doesn't really matter - and then hook up this transfusion pump, this IV set, and switch their blood, you know, pump the dog's blood into the hardbody and vice versa, did I ever tell you this? — Bret Easton Ellis

The conversation follows its own rolling accord - no real structure or topic or internal logic or feeling; except, of course, for its own hidden, conspiratorial one. Just words, and like in a movie, but one that has been transcribed improperly, most of it overlaps. — Bret Easton Ellis

I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? 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
and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed
and coming face to face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing ... — Bret Easton Ellis

I have to return some videotapes — Bret Easton Ellis

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

Confusion and hopelessness don't necessarily cause a person to act. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything - all the pain I felt, the betrayal - I couldn't help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn't disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. — Bret Easton Ellis

Rock 'n' roll. Deal with it. — Bret Easton Ellis

I like the idea of a writer being haunted by his own creation, especially if the writer resents the way the character defines him. — Bret Easton Ellis

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. — Bret Easton Ellis

Oh come on, don't look that way. You have nothing to be ashamed of."
"I'm not," she says, trying to act casual. "I just want to know if you're disappointed in me for admitting this."
How could she ever understand that there isn't any way I could be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to?
"You don't know much about me, do you?" I ask teasingly. — Bret Easton Ellis

Got you. You're mine now. For the rest of the day, week, month, year, life. Have you guessed who I am? Sometimes I think you have. Sometimes when you're standing in a crowd I feel those sultry, dark eyes of yours stop on me. Are you too afraid to come up to me and let me know how you feel? 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. I want to kill the ugly girls that you're always with. Do you really like those boring, naive, coy, calculating girls or is it just for sex? The seeds of love have taken hold, and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone. — Bret Easton Ellis

About a week ago I was sitting in L.A.'s chicest nightclub with a few friends and the DJ was playing Yaz and Bowie and the videos were on and I was on my third gin and tonic and I realized that no matter where I am it's always the same. Camden, New York, L.A., Palm Springs - it really doesn't seem to matter. Maybe this should be disturbing but it's really not. I find it kind of comforting. — Bret Easton Ellis

Looking at Tim, one cannot help feeling great waves of uncertainty, an absence of aim, of purpose, as if he is a person who simply doesn't matter. — Bret Easton Ellis

The seals stupidly dive off rocks into swirling black water, barking mindlessly. The zookeepers feed them dead fish. A crowd gathers around the tank, mostly adults, a few accompanied by children. On the seals' tank a plaque warns: COINS CAN KILL - IF SWALLOWED, COINS CAN LODGE IN AN ANIMAL'S STOMACH AND CAUSE ULCERS, INFECTIONS AND DEATH. DO NOT THROW COINS IN THE POOL. So what do I do? Toss a handful of change into the tank when none of the zookeepers are watching. It's not the seals I hate - it's the audience's enjoyment of them that bothers me. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

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

What do you want, Patrick?" she sighs.
"I just want peace, love, friendship, understanding," I say dispassionately. — Bret Easton Ellis

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. — Bret Easton Ellis

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. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

Why not?" she asks petulantly. "Give me one good reason we shouldn't." "Because trying to fuck you is like trying to French-kiss a very ... small and ... lively gerbil?" I tell her. "I don't know." "Yes?" she says. "And?" "With braces?" I finish, shrugging. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

She immediately moves into me and says she is sorry and then she's guiding me toward the bedroom and this is the way I always wanted the scene to play out and then it does and it has to because it doesnt really work for me unless it happens like this. — 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

What? Did we end up hating each other? Did we end up the way we thought we always knew would? Did I end up wearing khakis because of that fucking ad? — Bret Easton Ellis

I've been accused of being very vain about my apathy. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

When Blair bites her lower lip she's eighteen again. — 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

As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read. — Michiko Kakutani

These questions are punctuated by other questions, as diverse as "Will I ever do time?" and "Did this girl have a trusting heart?" The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I don't notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the disembodied voice coming from its mouth: These are terrible times. Maggots already writhe across the human sausage, the drool pouring from my lips dribbles over them, and still I can't tell if I'm cooking any of this correctly, because I'm crying too hard and I have never really cooked anything before. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

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

It's a world where getting stoned is the only option. — Bret Easton Ellis

...if you're alone nothing bad can happen to you. — Bret Easton Ellis

Don't tell me he was another serial killer, Bateman. Not another serial killer." "No, McDufus, he wasn't a serial killer, — Bret Easton Ellis

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

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

Dwelling over this loss while wandering down Central Park West somewhere around Seventy-sixth, Seventy-fifth, it strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place. — Bret Easton Ellis

But the thing I remember most about the screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a bit before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away. — 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

The Grinch says leave! — Bret Easton Ellis

Everyone I know who is successful has issues with their father, regardless of whether it was sports or business or entertainment. — Bret Easton Ellis

But you don't need anything. You have everything,' I tell him.
Rip looks at me. 'No I don't.'
'What?'
'No I don't.'
There's a pause and then I ask, 'Oh, shit, Rip, What don't you have?'
'I don't have anything to loose. — 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

Fear never shows up and the party ends early. — Bret Easton Ellis

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels. — Bret Easton Ellis

How do I know you're not crazy?" she asks. "How do I know you're not the craziest dude I've ever met?"
"You'll have to test me out."
"You have my info," she says. "I'll think about it."
"Rain," I say. "That's not your real name."
"Does it matter?"
"Well, it makes me wonder what else isn't real."
"That's because you're a writer," she says. "That's because you make things up for a living."
"And?"
"And"
she shrugs
"I've noticed that writers tend to worry about things like that. — Bret Easton Ellis

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. — Bret Easton Ellis

J&B I am thinking. Glass of J&B in my right hand I am thinking. Hand I am thinking. Charivari. Shirt from Charivari. Fusilli I am thinking. Jami Gertz I am thinking. I would like to fuck Jami Gertz I am thinking. Porsche 911. A sharpei I am thinking. I would like to own a sharpei. I am twenty-six years old I am thinking. I will be twenty-seven next year. A Valium. I would like a Valium. No, two Valium I am thinking. Cellular phone I am thinking. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

After a while you learn that everything stops. — Bret Easton Ellis

On the plane leaving Tokyo I'm sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing "Over the Rainbow" straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn't give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don't even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon. — Bret Easton Ellis

A young girl, a freshman, I met in a bar in Cambridge my junior year at Harvard told me early one fall that "Life is full of endless possibilities." I tried valiantly nog to choke on the beer nuts I was chewing while she gushed this kidney stone of wisdom, and I calmly washed them down with the rest of a Heineken, smiled and concentrated on the dart game that was going on in the corner. Needless to say, she did not live to see her sophomore year.That winter, her body was found floating in the Charles River, decapitated, her head hung from a tree on the bank, her hair knotted around a low-hanging branch, three miles away. — Bret Easton Ellis