Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The fact that... you categorize everything as either sexist, or racist, or homophobic, whether it is or not, and therefore harmful to you and you just can’t take it, is a kind of mania, a delusion, a psychosis that we have been coddling, encouraging people to think that life should be a smooth utopia built only for them and their fragile sensibility.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

152. “She immediately moves into me and says she is sorry and then she’s guiding me toward the bedroom and this is the way I always wanted the scene to play out and then it does and it has to because it doesnt really work for me unless it happens like this.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

153. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

154. “It’s really weird and I’m experiencing a spontaneous kind of internal sensation, I feel I’m moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

155. “This was sending me out so much further than I had ever expected: a place beyond strength.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

156. “I guess the consolation is that she’s not going to be beautiful forever,” he says. “But I’d like to be with her before that happens.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

157. “There’s a moment of sheer terror when I discover Paul’s apartment overlooks the park.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

158. “The Patty Winters Show this morning was about Nazis and, inexplicably, I got a real charge out of watching it. Though I wasn’t exactly charmed by their deeds, I didn’t find them unsympathetic either, nor I might add did most of the members of the audience. One of the Nazis, in a rare display of humor, even juggled grapefruits and, delighted, I sat up in bed and clapped.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

159. “I realize I have nothing to say to Trent Burroughs as I tell him, “I’ve been in New York the last four months.” New Age Christmas music fails to warm up the chilly vibe. I’m suddenly unsure about everything.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

160. “The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information – these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning – to restructure the evidence so it made sense – and that is what I failed at.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

161. “Well, I’m sorry.” I smile. “I’m having problems.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

162. “Who Dunnit?′ profoundly expresses the theme of confusion against a funky groove, and what makes this song so exciting is that it ends with its narrator never finding anything out at all.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

163. “Did you know I was born in a Holiday Inn.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

164. “This forced you to look again at the people who raised them, coddling them with praise and trying to shield them from the grim sides of life, which might well have created children who, as adults, appeared highly confident, competent and positive but at the hint of darkness or negativity often became paralyzed and unable to react except with disbelief and tears – You just victimized me! – and retreated, in effect, into their childhood bubbles.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

166. “Tim glances over at me and I avert my gaze and an imagined sense of imposed peace washes calmly over the two of us, answering my question.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

167. “Haven’t we outgrown all this tired irony? Weren’t we supposed to give up acting twenty-two forever?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

168. “It’s a world where getting stoned is the only option.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

169. “From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

170. “Women aren’t very bright,” Rip says. “Studies have been done.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

171. “Honey?” she asks. “Don’t call me that,” I snap. “What? Honey?” she asks. “Yes,” I snap again. “What do you want me to call you?” she asks, indignantly. “CEO?” She stifles a giggle. “Oh Christ.” “No, really Patrick. What do you want me to call you?” King, I’m thinking.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

172. “Hardbody.” McDermott nods in agreement. “Definitely.” “I’m not impressed,” Price sniffs. “Look at her knees.” While the hardbody stands there we check her out, and though her knees do support long, tan legs, I can’t help noticing that one knee is, admittedly, bigger than the other one. The left knee is knobbier, almost imperceptibly thicker than the right knee and this unnoticeable flaw now seems overwhelming and we all lose interest.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

173. “If I often wished the world were a different place, I also knew – and horror movies helped reinforce this – that it never would be, a realization that in turn led me to a mode of acceptance.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

174. “I was now looking at a new kind of liberalism, one that willingly censored people and punished voices, obstructed opinions and blocked viewpoints.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

175. “It was clear that this had not been my best term; it was clear that I was losing it.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

176. “How can I tell McDermott that this is a very disjointed time of my life and that I notice the walls have been painted a bright, almost painful white and under the glare of the fluorescent lights they seem to pulse and glow.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

177. “I’d never been a true believer that politics can solve the dark heart of humanity’s problems and the lawlessness of our sexuality, or that a bureaucratic band aid is going to heal the deep contradictory rifts and the cruelty, the passion and the fraudulence that factor into what it means to be human.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

178. “She’s simply another girl who has gotten by on her looks – her currency in this world – and it will not be fun to watch her grow old.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

179. “Some clowns make you laugh, but Bobo will make you die, and then he’ll eat your body.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

180. “There are no girls with good personalities,” we all say in unison, laughing, giving each other high-five.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

181. “Feelings aren’t facts and opinions aren’t crimes.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

182. “This widespread epidemic of self-victimization – defining yourself in essence by way of a bad thing, a trauma that happened in the past that you’ve let define you – is actually an illness.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

183. “I also think that Phil Collins works better within the confines of the group than as a solo artist – and I stress the word artist. In fact it applies to all three of the guys, because Genesis is still the best, most exciting band to come out of England in the 1980s.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

184. “American Psycho was about what it meant to be a person in a society you disagreed with and what happened when you attempted to accept and live with its values even if you knew they were wrong. Delusion and anxiety were the focal points.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

185. “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.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

186. “I have to return some video tapes.” – Patrick Bateman’s all-purpose exit excuse in “American Psycho.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

187. “Donald Trump is a big U2 fan and then, even more desperately, that John Gutfreund also buys their records.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

188. “And I just stood there in the fading afternoon light, realizing at seventeen that I was already staring into my past – that the past had a meaning that would always define you. I remember this being one of my first moments nearing adulthood, when I realized how powerful memory was – or at least it was the first time it hurt the most. And there was nothing I could do about the pain of the past – it just settled over me.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

189. “BMW.” He smiles. “Little black beamer.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

190. “The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump. “Have you read it?” I ask Kimball.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

191. “The Patty Winters Show this morning was in two parts. The first was an exclusive interview with Donald Trump, the second was a report on women who’ve been tortured.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

192. “Trent senses I’m tense and says, “What do you want me to do? You wanna lude, is that it?” He pulls out a Pez dispenser and pulls Daffy Duck’s head back. I don’t say anything, just keep staring at the Pez dispenser and then he puts it away and cranes his neck.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

193. “The men in King Cobra have already worked through whatever issues they might have had about their sexuality, and they have other problems to deal with, and there’s an actual plot that isn’t about being gay – it’s just a crime drama.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

194. “I sat there silently, staring at him, and immediately ordered a third martini, one more than I usually drink.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

195. “A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

196. “Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is it’s only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

197. “The reality is that men look at women, and men look at other men, and women look at men, and women especially size up other women and objectify them. Has anybody who’s ever been on a dating app recently not seen how our Darwinian impulses are gratified by a swipe or two? This, in order for our species to survive, is the way of the world and it’s never going to be modified or erased.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

198. “The topic on The Patty Winters Show this morning was Has Patrick Swayze Become Cynical or Not?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

199. “As the film historian and critic David Thomson has asked: “What are movies without male lust?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

200. “Actors depend on their likability, and their attractiveness, because they want people to watch them, to be drawn to them, to desire them. Because of this, actors are, by their very nature, liars.”

— Bret Easton Ellis