Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 6

201. “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

202. “Hey,” Price says. “I’m depressed, I mean impressed.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

203. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

206. “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

207. “Why wasn’t Donald Trump invited to your party?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

208. “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

209. “Walking with Debbie, our sunglasses on, I suddenly felt I was a model in a commercial, we were a couple in a travelogue who barely knew each other, which led to the notion that I was actually begin watched, that everyone was looking at me, whether they were or not, or that someone hidden, from a vantage point I couldn’t see, was monitoring my movements.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

210. “No negativity allowed: we’re only asking to be admired in the display culture we were raised in.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

211. “Yeah, we all have to leave,” he says. “You said that already.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

212. “I concentrate on the Absolut and cranberry I’m holding and it looks like a glassful of thin, watery blood with ice and a lemon wedge in it.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

213. “The Left had become a rage machine, burning itself up: a melting blue bubble dissolving in on itself.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

214. “Across the board, identity politics endorse the concept that people are essentially tribal, and our differences are irreconcilable, which of course makes diversity and inclusion impossible. This is the toxic dead-end of identity politics; it’s a trap.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

215. “The entertainment business forces you to become a gambler whether you like it or not, and the young men were rolling the dice against odds that were decidedly not in their favor.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

216. “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 can be extracted from my telling.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

217. “This is my reality. Everything outside of this is like some movie I once saw.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

218. “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

219. “I feel naked, suddenly tiny. My mouth tastes metallic, then it gets worse. My vision: a winter road. But I’m left with one comforting thought: I am rich – millions are not.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

220. “Romeo Void blared out of the sunroof.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

221. “Love cannot be trusted.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

222. “But if you look at everything only through the lens of your party or affiliation, and are capable of being in the same room only with people who think and vote like you, doesn’t that make you somewhat uncurious and oversimplifying, passive-aggressive, locked into assuming you are riding the high moral tide, without ever wondering if you might not, in the eyes of others, be on the very bottom?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

223. “Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist. This is what happens to a culture when it no longer cares about art.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

224. “Not being able or willing to put yourself in someone else’s shoes – to view life differently from how you yourself experience it – is the first step toward being not empathic, and this is why so many progressive movements become as rigid and as authoritarian as the institutions they’re resisting.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

225. “The greatest crime being perpetrated in this new world is that of stamping out passion and silencing the individual.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

226. “The next morning over a breakfast of bran muffins and kiwi and Evian water and wheatgrass juice, Ann mentioned something about buying a BMW and I had to hold back a scream. It was clear that this had not been my best term; it was clear that I was losing it.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

227. “What Kanye was championing in his Trump tweets was an idea of peace and unity, imagining a place where different sides could work together despite vicious ideological differences – that’s it. He wasn’t particularly interested in actual politics or literal policy, but it also seemed by the end of the summer of 2018 that no one else was, either.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

228. “He flirts and asks if I’m a model. “I’ll see you in hell,” I tell him, and move on.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

229. “Once upon a time I was liberal. Well, to be honest, less than a year ago I was still a liberal,” he announced in a video. “But I reject a system which allows an ambitious, misinformed, dogmatic group to suppress free speech, create false narratives and apathetically steamroll over the truth. I reject hate. These are the reasons why I became a liberal. And these are the same reasons why I am now walking away.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

230. “Listen,” I say, my voice trembling with emotion, “have whatever you want but I’m telling you I recommend the Diet Pepsi.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

231. “I had all the characteristics of a human being – flesh, blood, skin, hair – but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

232. “Cactus pear.” “Cactus fruit,” Evelyn corrects.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

233. “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

234. “I’m having a sort of hard time paying attention because my automated teller has started speaking to me, sometimes actually leaving weird messages on the screen, in green lettering, like “Cause a Terrible Scene at Sotheby’s” or “Kill the President” or “Feed Me a Stray Cat,” and I was freaked out by the park bench that followed me for six blocks last Monday evening and it too spoke to me. Disintegration – I’m taking it in stride.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

235. “I’ve started drinking my own urine. I laugh spontaneously at nothing. Sometimes I sleep under my futon. I’m flossing my teeth constantly until my gums are aching and my mouth tastes like blood.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

236. “Or maybe when you’re roiling in childish rage, the first thing you lose is judgment, and then comes common sense. And finally you lose your mind and along with that, your freedom.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

237. “I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, and that doing whatever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

238. “This was why it seemed to many of us in that summer that the Left was morphing into something it never had been in my lifetime: a morally superior, intolerant and authoritarian party that was out of touch and lacked any coherent ideology beyond its blanket refusal to credit an election in which someone they didn’t approve of had, at least legally, technically, won the White House. The Left had become a rage machine, burning itself up: a melting blue bubble dissolving in on itself.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

239. “And despite the connections provided by the internet and social media, many people felt even more isolated and increasingly aware that the idea of interconnectivity was itself an illusion. This seems particularly painful when you’re sitting alone in a room and staring at a glowing screen that promises you access to the intimacies of countless other lives, a condition that mirrors Bateman’s loneliness and alienation: everything’s available to him, yet that insatiable emptiness remains.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

240. “This particular wish – the desire to remain a child forever – strikes me as a defining aspect in American life right now: a collective sentiment that imposes itself over the neutrality of facts and context. This narrative is about how we wish the world worked out in contrast to the disappointment that everyday life offers us, and it helps us to shield ourselves from not only the chaos of reality but also from our own personal failures.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

241. “We stare at each other endlessly. I’m convinced she senses I’m about to say something. I’ve seen this look on someone’s face before. Was it in a club? A victim’s expression? Had it appeared on a movie screen recently? Or had I seen it in the mirror?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

242. “This cooling of excitement on all levels of the culture has to do with the disappearing notion of investment.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

243. “I poked fun at rich friends growling about the unfairness of the Electoral College over a dinner at Spago that cost thousands of dollars, and took Meryl Streep to task for her outraged anti-Trump speech at the Golden Globes the same week she’d put her Greenwich Village townhouse on the market for thirty million dollars.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

244. “Artists – or, in the local parlance, creatives – should no longer push any envelope, go to the dark side, explore taboos, make inappropriate jokes or offer contrarian opinions. We could, but not if we wanted to feed our families.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

245. “She bemoaned the fact that we didn’t seem to be at a point anymore when being extremely good at something – and getting rewarded for that talent with attention, respect and money – was even regarded as possible.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

246. “All we’ve really done is to set ourselves up – to be sold to, branded, targeted, data-mined. But this is the logical endgame of the democratization of culture and the dreaded cult of inclusivity, which insists everybody has to live under the same umbrella of rules and regulations: a mandate that dictates how all of us should express ourselves and behave.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

247. “Eyes suddenly focus in on the eyes of a small, dark, intense-looking guy wearing a Universal Studios T-shirt sitting two booths across from me. He’s staring at me and I look down and take a drag, a deep one, off the cigarette. The man keeps staring at me and all I can think is either he doesn’t see me or I’m not here. I don’t know why I think that. People are afraid to merge. Wonder if he’s for sale.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

248. “And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

249. “Owens asserted that Democrats were the real plantation owners, and at her college appearances she told young blacks to get over their self-victimization and identity-politics nonsense and stop comparing themselves to actual slaves.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

250. “Sheen’s supposed propensity for violence against women hadn’t hurt his popularity with female fans either, and if anyone wants to know what that means, then that’s a story for maybe fifty other books.”

— Bret Easton Ellis