Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Disappear here.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

Featured in: Quotes About Greed

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

4. “Rock ‘n’ roll. Deal with it.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

5. “I have to return some videotapes.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

8. “The better you look, the more you see.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

10. “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

11. “This is not an exit.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

13. “People are afraid to merge.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

16. “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

17. “We buy balloons, we let them go.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

18. “Why would I care what other people are thinking? I don’t care what an audience thinks of me.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

20. “No one ever likes the right person.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

22. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

26. “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

27. “Feelings aren’t facts and opinions aren’t crimes and aesthetics still count – and the reason I’m a writer is to present an aesthetic, things that are true without always having to be factual or immutable.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

28. “Price. You’re priceless.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

29. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

30. “Fear never shows up and the party ends early.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

31. “All of my books come from pain.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

32. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

33. “I feel like I’m not smart enough to answer the questions I’m asked.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

34. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

37. “I think basically most men are misogynistic.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

38. “Here’s the dead end of social media: after you’ve created your own bubble that reflects only what you relate to or what you identify with, after you’ve blocked and unfollowed people whose opinions and worldview you judge and disagree with, after you’ve created your own little utopia based on your cherished values, then a kind of demented narcissism begins to warp this pretty picture.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

39. “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

40. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

41. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

42. “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. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

43. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

46. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

47. “Bigfoot was interviewed on The Patty Winters Show this morning and to my shock I found him surprisingly articulate and charming.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

49. “And then I flashed on: When you talk to me you’re really talking to yourself, dude. I was still haunted by it.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

50. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis