Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

I have to return some videotapes

~ 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'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

The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

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

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

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. She says, People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I'm eighteen and it's December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair's clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than I'm pretty sure Muriel is anorexic or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blaire's car. All it comes down to is the fact that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

You learn to move on without the people you love.

~ 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

The better you look, the more you see.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the reading of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them – the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms – and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples give off and that permeated the air – the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere – despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

The Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash into Me” played over the montage, not that the lyrics had anything to do with the images the song was played over but it was “haunting”, it was “moody”, it was “summing things up”, it gave the footage an “emotional resonance” that I guess we were incapable of capturing ourselves. At first my feelings were basically so what? But then I suggested other music: “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, but I was told that the rights were sky-high and that the song was “too ominous” for this sequence; Nada Surf’s “Popular” had “too many minor chords”, it didn’t fit the “mood of the piece,” it was – again – “too ominous.” When I told them I seriously did not think things could get any more fucking ominous than they already were, I was told, “Things get very much more ominous, Victor,” and then I was left alone.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information--these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning--to restructure the evidence so it made sense--and that is what I failed at.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.

~ 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

What you need is a chick from Camden,' Van Patten says, after recovering from McDermott's statement.Oh great,' I say. 'Some chick who thinks it's okay to fuck her brother.'Yeah, but they think AIDS is a new band from England,' Price points out.Where's dinner?' Van Patten asks, absently studying the question scrawled on his napkin. 'Where the fuck are we going?'It's really funny that girls think guys are concerned with that, with diseases and stuff,' Van Patten says, shaking his head.I'm not gonna wear a fucking condom,' McDermott announces.I have read this article I've Xeroxed,' Van Patten says, 'and it says our chances of catching that are like zero zero zero zero point half a decimal percentage or something, and this no matter what kind of scumbag, slutbucket, horndog chick we end up boffing.'Guys just cannot get it.'Well, not white guys.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

... Because the writer resented that she had turned to me I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. 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

He wasn't, I realized when I read those scenes concerning Blair and myself, close to any of us-- except of course to Blair, and really not even to her. 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. But there was no point in being angry with him.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's I Love L.A.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

The audience-- the book's actual cast-- quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material-- surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality-- had to be reshaped.

~ 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

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.)

~ 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 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

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

What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists?

~ Bret Easton Ellis

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

~ Bret Easton Ellis

You have neither the clout nor the experience to make a threat like that, Victor.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

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

~ 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

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

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

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.

~ 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

Everything suddenly seems displaced, subtle gradations erase borders, but it’s more forceful than 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

Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire -- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathizing, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt any more. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged...

~ Bret Easton Ellis