Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Redken product that prevents mineral deposits and prolongs the life cycle of hair.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

268. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

280. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

285. “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

286. “And a new irony had entered the picture: I was now hearing about how irritating the Left had become from people on the Left. One evening over drinks someone sighed to me, “I don’t know how we got so annoying.” And at a dinner a middle-aged liberal scoffed, “Oh, I can’t deal with the Resistance anymore” – and this from a gay man who’d been a proud member of it.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

287. “At our last session – yesterday, in fact – the psychiatrist I’ve been seeing for the past two months asked, “What method of contraception do you and Evelyn use?” and I sighed before answering, my eyes fixed out the window on a skyscraper, then at the painting above the Turchin glass coffee table, a giant visual reproduction of a graphic equalizer by another artist, not Onica. “Her job.”

— Bret Easton Ellis