Top 280 Bret Easton Ellis Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

261. “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

262. “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

263. “Someone named Angel was supposed to go with us tonight, but earlier today she got caught in the drain of her jacuzzi and almost drowned.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

264. “Why did people think I was attacking her identity instead of speculating about the fraudulence of the Oscars?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

265. “On my way into the Chinese cleaners I brush past a crying bum, an old man, forty or fifty, fat and grizzled, and just as I’m opening the door I notice, to top it off, that he’s also blind and I step on his foot, which is actually a stump, causing him to drop his cup, scattering change all over the sidewalk. Did I do this on purpose? What do you think? Or did I do this accidentally?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

266. “Moral of the story?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

268. “My life is essentially uncomplicated.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

269. “The Patty Winters Show this morning was in two parts. The first was an exclusive interview with Donald Trump, the second was a report on women who’ve been tortured.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

270. “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

271. “Back at our table Reeves is telling Hamlin about how he taunts the homeless in the streets, about how he hands a dollar to them as he approaches and then yanks it away and pockets it right when he passes the bums.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

272. “My friend also noted that it was harder to meet girls online here in blue-state California, where it seemed “Where do you stand politically?” had become the question most frequently asked by females, replacing the previous: “How tall are you?”

— Bret Easton Ellis

273. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Bret Easton Ellis