Bret easton ellis quotes

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.

I am gripped by an existential panic.

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

I feel like I'm not smart enough to answer the questions I'm asked.

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.

I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my 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

Exploitation is a harsh word, I know that, but on a certain level, to me that is the central Hollywood story.

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

No one is drawn to writing about being happy or feelings of joy.

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.

Eventually everyone has to hit the dark side of life - Someone doesn't like you, someone doesn't like your work, someone doesn't love you back... people die. What we have is a generation who are super-confident and super-positive about things, but when the least bit of darkness enters their lives, they're paralyzed.

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.

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

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

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

You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.

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

Baby, when you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to say live and let live. You know you did, you know you did, you know you did.

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

After a while you learn that everything stops.

A child should never even think about being a "good son." A parent decides that fate for the child. The parent encourages that. Not the child himself. And the "perfect dad"? I shudder at thinking what that may be.

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.

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.

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

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

...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.

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.

My pain is constant and sharp...this confession has meant nothing

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.

Completely committed to adapting 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. This is not a joke. Christian Grey and Ana: potentially great cinematic characters.

It's like my characters, all my men are Dad and me in a mess; all my female characters are smart and hopeful, like Mom just trying to make the best of things.

If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

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.

I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

No one ever likes the right person.

I think we've all lost some kind of feeling.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Hope E.L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.

Where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible.

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

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

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.

Price. You're priceless.

I think the books are the books. They were conceived as books. They weren't conceived as movies. When I write scripts, that's an idea and a situation that I think is a really good idea for a movie. When I'm writing a book, I'm not thinking, "Oh, this would be a great movie." This would be a very interesting book. And I think the books are things that cannot really be adapted into another medium.

Are you as much of a criminal if you don't act when there's a crime taking place in front of you as you are one of the participants? That was something that I was thinking about a lot because there are many moments in 'Less Than Zero' where horrific things happen and Clay could do something about them, but his passivity stops him.

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.

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.

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

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

I laugh maniacally, then take a deep breath and touch my chest- expecting a heart to be thumping quickly, impatiently, but there's nothing there, not even a beat.

The better you look, the more you see.

Not being able to find meaning can be just as powerful as finding meaning.

I think in life, there are certain choices you make that are timeless and universal, and don't necessarily have anything to do with the particulars of a certain decade.

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.

There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. 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 there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.

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.

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.

All of my books come from pain.

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.

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.

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.

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

A great numb feeling washes over me as I let go of the past and look forward to the future. Pretend to be a vampire. I don't really need to pretend, because it's who I am, an emotional vampire. I've just come to expect it. Vampires are real. That I was born this way. That I feed off of other people's real emotions. Search for this night's prey. Who will it be?

When the going gets tough, the tough go drinking.

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

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

If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies.

'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...'

...if you're alone nothing bad can happen to you.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Do you wear a diaphragm everywhere you go?' I want to scream, but stop myself because the idea really excites me.

Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn't a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don't know. I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility.

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

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

People can get accustomed to anything, right? Habit does things to people.

Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.

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.

I write books to relieve ­myself of pain. That's the prime motivator to write. Period.

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

You learn to move on without the people you love.

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.

It's because you're always fighting sentiment. You're fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way.

We buy balloons, we let them go.

Why would I care what other people are thinking? I don't care what an audience thinks of me.

People are afraid to merge.

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.)

I went to college in Vermont, and then stayed in the East Coast.

I think the '80s created me, in a way, when I look back on that time, but I don't necessarily think that a lot of my choices, and a lot of things that I did, and a lot of things that happened to me - or I let happen to me - were about that decade.

Rock 'n' roll. Deal with it.

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

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.

And as the elevator descents, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even father down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst

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.

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

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.

There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

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

I had no idea that 'Less Than Zero' was going to be read by anyone outside of Los Angeles, and it's - believe me, as the writer of the book I'm somewhat amused and intrigued by the idea that 25 years later it's still out and people are still reading it.

I do not feel I have a legacy to protect.

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

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.

I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."

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

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

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?

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

I've been accused of being very vain about my apathy.

Adjust my dreams for me.

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.

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

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

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

I think basically most men are misogynistic.

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

I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.

Fear never shows up and the party ends early.