Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I don’t know why I write what I write.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

52. “It’s the rare book that’s able to transport you in a way that a movie does.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

55. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

57. “My life is essentially uncomplicated.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

58. “I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say “I love you I love you I love you” while stripping. I want you so bad it stings.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

59. “The Patty Winters Show this morning was about people with half their brains removed. My chest feels like ice.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

60. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

61. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

62. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

63. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

65. “I have a lunch meeting with Cliff Huxtable at The Four Seasons in twenty minutes anyway,” I lie, standing up. “I have to go too.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

66. “My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

69. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

71. “Disintegration – I’m taking it in stride.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

72. “I passed what I thought was a Halloween parade, which was disorienting since I was fairly sure this was May. When I stopped on the corner of Sixteenth Street and made a closer inspection it turned out to be something called a “Gay Pride Parade,” which made my stomach turn.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

73. “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

74. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

76. “I totally relate to Tom Cruise. He’s not crazy, it’s just the litany of the mid-life crisis.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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:.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

80. “Dwelling over this loss while wandering down Central Park West somewhere around Seventy-sixth, Seventy-fifth, it strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

81. “I have no patience for revelations, for new beginnings, for events that take place beyond the realm of my immediate vision.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

82. “After a while you learn that everything stops.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

83. “Did I ever tell you that I want to wear a big yellow smiley-face mask and then put on the CD version of Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ and then take a girl and a dog – a collie, a chow, a sharpei, it doesn’t really matter – and then hook up this transfusion pump, this IV set, and switch their blood, you know, pump the dog’s blood into the hardbody and vice versa, did I ever tell you this?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

84. “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

85. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

86. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

87. “You can disappear here without knowing it.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

88. “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.””

— Bret Easton Ellis

89. “I think we’ve all lost some kind of feeling.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

91. “And later when we got into the car, he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end. “Where are we going?” I asked. “I don’t know” he said “just driving”. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

92. “I am gripped by an existential panic.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

93. “With Taipei Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

95. “I would demand to wear Ray-Ban sunglasses. Expensive Ray-Bans,” I say carefully. “In fact I would demand that everyone would have to wear Ray-Ban sunglasses.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

96. “I am a ghost to this man, I’m thinking. I am something unreal, something not quite tangible, yet still an obstacle of sorts and he nods, gets back on the phone, resumes speaking in a dialect totally alien to me.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

97. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

98. “I needed something – the distraction of another life – to alleviate fear.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

99. “I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

100. “Adjust my dreams for me.”

— Bret Easton Ellis