Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump. “Have you read it?” I ask Kimball.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

215. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “Weekend is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era.” The shock of Weekend is that there is no political cause at the heart of it.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

224. “Armstrong just got back from the islands and has a very deep, very even tan, but so do I.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

225. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

227. “Have you ever wished that you could disappear from all this?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

228. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

232. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

234. “There’s a man sitting at the table next to ours whose eyes are closed very tightly. The girl he’s sitting with doesn’t seem to mind and picks at a salat. When the man finally opens his eyes, I’m relieved for some reason.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

235. “Liberalism used to concern itself with freedoms I’d aligned myself with, but during the 2016 campaigns, it finally hardened into a warped authoritarian moral superiority movement that I didn’t want to have anything to do with.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

237. “I thought I was going to cry but it passed.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

238. “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

239. “I told you, dude,” Van Patten says and then patiently restates his facts. “We can’t get that. It’s like zero zero zero point oh one percentage –.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

240. “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

241. “What is it?” I ask, opening the folded page. “It’s an article on your hero, Donald Trump.” McDermott grins.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

242. “Courtney, McDermott and I have just left a Morgan Stanley party that took place near the Seaport at the tip of Manhattan in a new club called Goldcard, which seemed like a vast city of its own and where I ran into Walter Rhodes, a total Canadian, whom I haven’t seen since Exeter and who also, like McDermott, reeked of Xeryus, and I actually told him, “Listen, I’m trying to stay away from people. I’m avoiding even speaking to them,” and then I asked to be excused.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

243. “No one cared what we watched or didn’t, how we felt or what we wanted, and we hadn’t yet become enthralled by the cult of victimization. It was, by comparison to what’s now acceptable when children are coddled into helplessness, an age of innocence.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

244. “I don’t trust anyone named Gavin.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

245. “The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

247. “But maybe I was more like Lena Dunham on her TV series Girls, which examined her own generation with a caustic, withering eye yet also remained supportive. And this is crucial: you can be both. In order to be an artist, to raise yourself above the overreacting fear-based din in which criticism is considered elitist, you need to be both.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

248. “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

249. “I’ve adapted; these events have toughened me and I’m prepared to deal with this particular topic.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

250. “The Bigelow tweets now crested with “I still believe that if ‘The Hurt Locker’ had been directed by a man it would not have won the Oscar for best director.” I liked the definitiveness of this proclamation.”

— Bret Easton Ellis