Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “As the film historian and critic David Thomson has asked: “What are movies without male lust?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

202. “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

203. “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

204. “Talking animals were the topic of this morning’s Patty Winters Show. An octopus was floating in a makeshift aquarium with a microphone attached to one of its tentacles and it kept asking – or so its “trainer,” who is positive that mollusks have vocal cords, assured us – for “cheese.” I watched, vaguely transfixed, until I started to sob.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

211. “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

212. “Love cannot be trusted.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

218. “Patrick’s obsession with his likes and dislikes and with detailing everything he owns, wears, eats, and watches has reached a new apotheosis. In many respects American Psycho is one man’s ultimate series of selfies.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “Luis Carruthers... takes the seat next to mine which means I’m supposed to take off my walkman.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

223. “I suddenly thought again: as a writer, you’re always hearing things that aren’t there.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

224. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

230. “Clinton’s advisers Robby Mook and John Podesta had said when Trump called the Electoral College “a rigged thing” and “a fraud,” suggesting that maybe only the popular vote should matter.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

231. “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

232. “Redken product that prevents mineral deposits and prolongs the life cycle of hair.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

233. “This was exactly what many of us thought Twitter had encouraged in its early years, back when “offensive” tweets didn’t yet somehow define the entire humanity of an individual and land him in jail with a lifetime sentence.”

— 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. “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

236. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

239. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

241. “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

242. “Okay, even though you think Erasure is a good band, I think I can still trust you.” “They are, Victor, and –.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

243. “It’s getting to be toward midnight and someone pays the check and I tell Trent, after Blair’s left for the restroom, that I didn’t have the slightest idea who Walker is. Trent looks at me and says, “You don’t make any sense, you know that?” “I make sense.” “No, dude. You’re ridiculous.” “Why don’t I make sense?” “Because you just don’t.” “That doesn’t make sense.” “Maybe it doesn’t.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

244. “I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is saved, nothing is redeemed.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

245. “It’s not his girlfriend. It’s Princess Toadstool. And it’s not a gorilla,” I stress. “It’s Lemmy Koopa of the evil Koopa clan. And baby, as usual, you’re missing the point.” “Please enlighten me.” “The whole point of Super Mario Bros. is that it mirrors life.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

248. “Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? Had she ever cried because she hated someone so much? Had she ever craved betrayal to the point where she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it? Could she locate the moment she went dead inside? Does she remember the year it took to become that way? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away...”

— Bret Easton Ellis

249. “It’s an article on your hero, Donald Trump.” McDermott grins.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

250. “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