Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “This cooling of excitement on all levels of the culture has to do with the disappearing notion of investment.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

264. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

276. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “Hollywood had revealed itself in countless ways as one of the most hypocritical capitalist enclaves in the world, with a preening surface attitude advocating progressivism, equality, inclusivity and diversity – except not when it came down to inclusivity and diversity of political thought and opinion and language.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

285. “The question for him now had become: Well, were any of them really his friends in the first place? If they could ditch him so completely over Trump, maybe they never had been. He’d often wondered: Was this really all it took? Was defending the president you had supported and voted for that immoral and outrageous? Apparently, for some on the Left this was reason enough to abandon a friend or a relative or even an acquaintance.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

286. “When did people start identifying so relentlessly with victims, and when did the victim’s worldview become the lens through which we began to look at everything?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

287. “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