Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

“I have to return some videotapes”

“And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention”

“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.”

“After a while you learn that everything stops.”

“Rock 'n' roll. Deal with it.”

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

“I think a lot of snowflakes are alike… and I think a lot of people are alike too.”

“You learn to move on without the people you love.”

“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.”

“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.”

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

“I'm into, oh murders and executions mostly. It depends.”

“What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.”

“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.”

“No one ever likes the right person.”

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

“I only had sex with her because I'm in love with you.”

“I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane?”

“There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.”

“This is not an exit.”

“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.”

“Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.”

“We buy balloons, we let them go.”

“When the going gets tough, the tough go drinking.”

“Disintegration---I'm taking it in stride.”

“But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.”

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

“My pain is constant and sharp… this confession has meant nothing”

“Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.”

“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…”

“I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care.”

“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.”

“Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead.”

“I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.”

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

“Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever.”

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

“I tried to make meat loaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body”

“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 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.”

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

“I've forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where.”

“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.)”

“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.”

“I wasn't acting on passion. I was simply acting.”

“The Smiths are singing and someone says "Turn that gay angst music off.”

“Yes. Yes I am. I am a completely demented misogynist.”

“Adjust my dreams for me.”

“Price. You're priceless.”

“What keeps me interested--and it always does--is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?”

“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.”

“… if you're alone nothing bad can happen to you.”

“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.”

“Specks—specks all over the third panel, see?—no, that one—the second one up from the floor and I wanted to point this out to someone yesterday but a photo shoot intervened and Yaki Nakamari or whatever the hell the designer's name is—a master craftsman not—mistook me for someone else so I couldn't register the complaint, but, gentlemen—and ladies—there they are: specks, annoying, tiny specks, and they don't look accidental but like they were somehow done by a machine—so I don't want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don't leave out why, though I'm getting the distinct impression by the looks on your sorry faces that why won't get answered—now, come on, goddamnit, what's the story?”

“…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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I just had my makeup done, so you can't make me cry.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”