Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

102. “I’ve been accused of being very vain about my apathy.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

103. “Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

104. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

105. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

106. “There is music playing somewhere but I can’t hear it.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

107. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

110. “Nothing. Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing,” I tell her.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

111. “I do not feel I have a legacy to protect.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

112. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

113. “There was a romance to that analog era, an ardency, an otherness that is missing in the post-Empire digital age where everything has ultimately come to feel disposable.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

115. “It moved me away from the narcissism of childhood and into the world’s mysteries – the unexplained, the taboo, the other – and drew me closer to a place of understanding and acceptance.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

116. “So many people died last year: the accidental overdose, the car wreck in East Hampton, the surprise illness. People just disappeared. I fall asleep to the music coming from the Abbey, a song from the past, “Hungry Like the Wolf,” rising faintly above the leaping chatter of the club, transporting me for one long moment into someone both young and old. Sadness: it’s everywhere.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

119. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

120. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

121. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

122. “I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

123. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

124. “It’s as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there... is... no... key.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

125. “I wasn’t acting on passion. I was simply acting.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

126. “There are some guys sitting at tables who all look at this one gorgeous girl, longingly, hoping for at least one dance or a blow job in Daddy’s car and there are all these girls, looking indifferent or bored, smoking clove cigarettes, all of them or at least most of them staring at one blond-haired boy standing in the back with sunglasses on. Julian.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

127. “We seem to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing their true selves. In other words: the actor’s dream.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

128. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

129. “Why not end up with her? floats into my line of vision. An answer: she has a better body than most other girls I know. Another one: everyone is interchangeable anyway.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

130. “I’m having a difficult time containing my disordered self.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

131. “I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn’t thinking about them being movies.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

132. “God, the name Susan is so ugly. It reminds me of the word sinus.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

134. “Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or another, working through my feelings at the time.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

135. “Mi dolor es constante e intenso y no espero que haya un mundo mejor para nadie. De hecho quiero que mi dolor le sea inflingido a otros.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

136. “It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never “Let’s not get the bottle of Cristal.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

137. “Like these girls care,” Price snorts. “When I tell them what my annual income is, believe me, my behavior couldn’t matter less.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

138. “When I flush the toilet in my bathroom, it becomes stopped up with Kleenex, and blood clouds the water and I put down the lid, because there’s nothing else for me to do.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

139. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

140. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

141. “I think about other things while she describes her recent past: air, water, sky, time, a moment, a point somewhere when I wanted to show her everything beautiful in the world.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

142. “Did I do this on purpose? What do you think? Or did I do this accidentally?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

143. “And by the way, did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like Garfield but run over and skinned and then someone threw an ugly Ferragamo sweater over you before they rushed you to the vet? Fusilli? Olive oil on Brie?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

144. “Confusion and hopelessness don’t necessarily cause a person to act.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

145. “Something is turning into nothing very quickly.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

146. “This is reality, and as my loathsome brother Sean would say, I have to deal with it. The.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

147. “Looking at Tim, one cannot help feeling great waves of uncertainty, an absence of aim, of purpose, as if he is a person who simply doesn’t matter.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

148. “Everything has been degraded by what the sensory overload and the supposed freedom-of-choice technology has brought to us, and, in short, by the democratization of the arts.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

149. “When Blair bites her lower lip she’s eighteen again.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

150. “Lover?” se asks, her voice reminding me of someone human.”

— Bret Easton Ellis