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Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

Total quotes: 36
“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.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero
Tagged: caring, Pain, worry, Giving Up, Sad
“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...”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Evil, Surface, God is dead
“This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Torment, Torture
“I like to keep "office hours" meaning pretty much 10-6 in the office working on various projects. If something is due I might go late, overtime, but usually prefer evenings to be open.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Easton Ellis On His Next Novel
Tagged: Writers, Artists, How to be a writer, inspiration
“If you make money you are always ensured work. It's a capitalist society baby.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Easton Ellis On How To Be A Writer
Tagged: Money, Writing, How to be a writer, Writers and money, Capitalism, My aesthetic
“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.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Youth, When We're Young
“Hollywood had revealed itself in countless ways as one of the most hypocritical capitalist enclaves in the world.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Easton Ellis: Why liberal lunatics are deeply wrong about Kanye West
Tagged: Hollywood
“I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of nonfiction as I could in any of my novels and so I gave up.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Fiction Is Non-Fiction, Reality Hunger, Identity Construction, Fiction Writing, Narrative Fallacy, Lies as Truth
“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?”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
“She’s barely gained consciousness and when she sees me, standing over her, naked, I can imagine that my virtual absence of humanity fills her with mind-bending horror.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Seeing Evil
“You are a fucking ugly bitch I want to stab to death and play around with your blood.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Awful
“People can get accustomed to anything, right? Habit does things to people.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Routine, Slow Roll of Evil
“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.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Self Discovery
“I need my bed made before I start writing.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Easton Ellis On His Next Novel
Tagged: Writers, Artists, How to be a writer, inspiration
“...and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction
Tagged: Love, romance, Passionate Love, Loving Deeply, Lovers
“How strange to type that. How intimate.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Easton Ellis Talks About His Favorite Food
Tagged: food, Writers, Good writing, Artists
“I see a ten-year-old girl standing by her mother, who is buying a scarf, some jewelry, and I’m thinking: Not bad. I’m wearing a cashmere topcoat, a double-breasted plaid wool and alpaca sport coat, pleated wool trousers, patterned silk tie, all by Valentino Couture, and leather lace-ups by Allen-Edmonds.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
“I … want … to … fit … in.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: misfit
“An especially loud New Order song comes from the open windows at McCullough, ‘Your Silent Face.’ Sean liked this song, so did Mitchell in fact. Gerald says, ‘Jesus, I really hate this song.’ I kiss him once more. It turns out to be the last song of the party. It fades out, nothing replaces it.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction
Tagged: References to Songs In Literature and Books, New Order
“The new trend is no trend.”
— Victor Ward, Glamorama
“… 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.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Identity, Nihilism
“Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers
Tagged: Greed, Sex, Youth
“When we look up at the clouds she sees an island, a puppy dog, Alaska, a tulip. I see, but don’t tell her, a Gucci money clip, an ax, a woman cut in two, a large puffy white puddle of blood that spreads across the sky, dripping over the city, onto Manhattan.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Seeing Evil
“All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: beauty, looks, Feelings
“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero
Tagged: first lines of books
“I was relaxed in the suburbs. Everything was different: the rhythm of the days, your social status, suspicions about people. It was a refuge for the less competitive; it was the minor leagues. You simply didn’t have to pay as much attention to things.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: The Suburbs
“In the kitchen I try 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, then I rest by watching a tape of last week’s new CBS sitcom, Murphy Brown.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Murder
“You do an awfully good impression of yourself.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
Tagged: first lines of books
“No one ever likes the right person.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction
Tagged: crushes, Dating, Relationships
“Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?”
— Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Evil, actions, Questions
“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.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: misfit
“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 be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away – I now want to explain these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone.”
— Clay Easton, Imperial Bedrooms (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: How Bret Easton Ellis Ends His Books, Mirrors
“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. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term 'generosity of spirit' applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Tagged: Desert, Nihilism, Vanishing Point
“Later, predictably, she's tied to the floor, naked, on her back, both feet, both hands, tied to makeshift posts that are connected to boards which are weighted down with metal. The hands are shot full of nails and her legs are spread as wide as possible. A pillow props her ass up and cheese, Brie, has been smeared across her open cunt, some of it even pushed up into the vaginal cavity. She's barely gained consciousness and when she sees me, standing over her, naked, I can imagine that my virtual absence of humanity fills her with mind-bending horror. I've”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
“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 not 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.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Hope
“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 Misérables 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, American Psycho
Tagged: first lines of books
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