Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

161. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

163. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

165. “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

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. “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

168. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

172. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

174. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

176. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

178. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

186. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

188. “On The Patty Winters Show this morning a Cheerio sat in a very small chair and was interviewed for close to an hour.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

189. “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

190. “I mean I tell her I’m sensitive. I told her I was freaked out by the Challenger accident – what more does she want?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

192. “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

193. “I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

195. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

198. “The feminist reaction to Playboy seemed unfair because our options pre-internet were so severely limited – maybe a couple issues of a magazine per month – that to apply moral criticism to our desires seemed cruel.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

199. “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

200. “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