Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

Confusion and hopelessness don't necessarily cause a person to act.
Bret Easton Ellis
‏@BretEastonEllis 31 MarAfter watching the delirious Room 237 I realized that the worst thing happening to movies was the empowerment of the viewer via technology.
Bret Easton Ellis
In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn't blond, I wasn't tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie's moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone's drug use and trying to save Julian. (I'll sell my car," I warn the actor playing Julian's dealer. "Whatever it takes.") This was slightly less true of Blair's character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group-- jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. "Be good to her," Julian tells Clay. "She really deserves it." The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room.
Bret Easton Ellis
I had this dream, see, where I saw the whole world melt. I was standing on La Cienega and from there I could see the whole world and it was melting and it was just so strong and realistic like. And so I thought, Well, if this dream comes true, how can I stop it, you know? How can I change things, you know? So I thought if I, like pierced my ear or something, like alter my physical image, dye my hair, the world wouldn't melt. So I dyed my hair and this pink lasts. I like it. It lasts. I don't feel like the world is gonna melt anymore.
Bret Easton Ellis
The heroin flowing through me, I thought about the last time I saw my father alive. He was drunk and overweight in a restaurant in Beverly Hills, and curling into myself on the bed I thought: What if I had done something that day? I had just sat passively in a restaurant booth as the midday light filled the half-empty dining room, pondering a decision. The decision was: should you disarm him? That was the word I remember: disarm. Should you tell him something that might not be the truth but would get the desired reaction? And what was I going to convince him of, even though it was a lie? Did it matter? Whatever it was, it would constitute a new beginning. The immediate line: You’re my father and I love you. I remember staring at the white tablecloth as I contemplated saying this. Could I actually do it? I didn’t believe it, and it wasn’t true, but I wanted it to be. For one moment, as my father ordered another vodka (it was two in the afternoon; this was his fourth) and started ranting about my mother and the slump in California real estate and how “your sisters” never called him, I realized it could actually happen, and that by saying this I would save him. I suddenly saw a future with my father. But the check came along with the drink and I was knocked out of my reverie by an argument he wanted to start and I simply stood up and walked away from the booth without looking back at him or saying goodbye and then I was standing in sunlight. Loosening my tie as a parking valet pulled up to the curb in the cream-colored 450 SL. I half smiled at the memory, for thinking that I could just let go of the damage that a father can do to a son. I never spoke to him again.
Bret Easton Ellis
This is laid down with a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince of Michael Jackson--or any other black artist of the recent years for that matter--has come up with.
Bret Easton Ellis
I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings.
Bret Easton Ellis
At Columbus Circle, a juggler wearing a trench cloak and top hat, who is usually at this location afternoons and who calls himself Stretch Man, performs in front of a small, uninterested crowd; though I smell prey, and he seems worthy of my wrath, I move on in search of a less dorky target. Though if he’d been a mime, odds are he’d already be dead.
Bret Easton Ellis
This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire—meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged …
Bret Easton Ellis
Akthent on thee latht thyllable.
Bret Easton Ellis
Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire -- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathizing, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt any more. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged...
Bret Easton Ellis
The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.
Bret Easton Ellis
Everything suddenly seems displaced, subtle gradations erase borders, but it’s more forceful than that.
Bret Easton Ellis
Yes. Yes I am. I am a completely demented misogynist.
Bret Easton Ellis
Her need is so immense that you become surrounded by it; this need is so enormous that you realize you can actually control it, and I know this because I've done it before.
Bret Easton Ellis
Disappear Here.The syringe fills with blood.You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.Wonder if he's for sale.People are afraid to merge. To merge.
Bret Easton Ellis
What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest.'What do you do?''What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?''Why not?'She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.'Because... I don't know,' she sighs.I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.
Bret Easton Ellis
But you don't need anything. You have everything,' I tell him.Rip looks at me. 'No I don't.''What?''No I don't.'There's a pause and then I ask, 'Oh, shit, Rip, What don't you have?''I don't have anything to loose.
Bret Easton Ellis
Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?
Bret Easton Ellis
How do I know you're not crazy?" she asks. "How do I know you're not the craziest dude I've ever met?" "You'll have to test me out." "You have my info," she says. "I'll think about it." "Rain," I say. "That's not your real name." "Does it matter?" "Well, it makes me wonder what else isn't real." "That's because you're a writer," she says. "That's because you make things up for a living." "And?" "And"-- she shrugs--"I've noticed that writers tend to worry about things like that.
Bret Easton Ellis
But the thing I remember most about the screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a bit before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.
Bret Easton Ellis
My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone.
Bret Easton Ellis
You have neither the clout nor the experience to make a threat like that, Victor.
Bret Easton Ellis
Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?
Bret Easton Ellis
What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists?
Bret Easton Ellis
But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.
Bret Easton Ellis
It's basically a joke." "I think it's cool," Julian says. "It's all about control, right?" He considers something. "It's not a joke. You should take it seriously. I mean, you're also one of the producers--" I cut him off. "Why have you been tracking this?" "It's a big deal and--" "Julian, it's a movie," I say. "Why have you been tracking this? It's just another movie." "Maybe for you." "What does that mean?" "Maybe for others it's something else," Julian says. "Something more meaningful." "I get where you're coming from, but there's a vampire in it.
Bret Easton Ellis
A vast and abandoned world laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, a view that confirmed you were much more alone than you thought you were, a view that inspired the flickering thoughts of suicide.
Bret Easton Ellis
On the plane leaving Tokyo I’m sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing “Over the Rainbow” straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn’t give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don’t even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon.
Bret Easton Ellis
I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)
Bret Easton Ellis
She said that you--" "I don't care what she said." I stand up. "Everyone lies." "Hey," he says softly. "It's just a code." "No. Everyone lies." I stub the cigarette out. "It's just another language you have to learn." Then he delicately adds, "I think you need some coffee, dude." Pause. "Why are you so angry?
Bret Easton Ellis
I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is 'Disappear Here' and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.
Bret Easton Ellis
... Because the writer resented that she had turned to me I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. That's how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That's how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That's how I became the boy who wouldn't save a friend. That's how I became the boy who couldn't love the girl.
Bret Easton Ellis
He wasn't, I realized when I read those scenes concerning Blair and myself, close to any of us-- except of course to Blair, and really not even to her. He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all. But there was no point in being angry with him.
Bret Easton Ellis
Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's "I Love L.A.
Bret Easton Ellis
The audience-- the book's actual cast-- quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material-- surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality-- had to be reshaped.
Bret Easton Ellis
What you need is a chick from Camden,' Van Patten says, after recovering from McDermott's statement.Oh great,' I say. 'Some chick who thinks it's okay to fuck her brother.'Yeah, but they think AIDS is a new band from England,' Price points out.Where's dinner?' Van Patten asks, absently studying the question scrawled on his napkin. 'Where the fuck are we going?'It's really funny that girls think guys are concerned with that, with diseases and stuff,' Van Patten says, shaking his head.I'm not gonna wear a fucking condom,' McDermott announces.I have read this article I've Xeroxed,' Van Patten says, 'and it says our chances of catching that are like zero zero zero zero point half a decimal percentage or something, and this no matter what kind of scumbag, slutbucket, horndog chick we end up boffing.'Guys just cannot get it.'Well, not white guys.
Bret Easton Ellis
And it struck me then, that I liked Sean because he looked, well, slutty. A boy who had been around. A boy who couldn't remember if he was Catholic or not.
Bret Easton Ellis
It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.
Bret Easton Ellis
The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information--these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning--to restructure the evidence so it made sense--and that is what I failed at.
Bret Easton Ellis
The Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash into Me” played over the montage, not that the lyrics had anything to do with the images the song was played over but it was “haunting”, it was “moody”, it was “summing things up”, it gave the footage an “emotional resonance” that I guess we were incapable of capturing ourselves. At first my feelings were basically so what? But then I suggested other music: “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, but I was told that the rights were sky-high and that the song was “too ominous” for this sequence; Nada Surf’s “Popular” had “too many minor chords”, it didn’t fit the “mood of the piece,” it was – again – “too ominous.” When I told them I seriously did not think things could get any more fucking ominous than they already were, I was told, “Things get very much more ominous, Victor,” and then I was left alone.
Bret Easton Ellis
When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them – the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms – and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples give off and that permeated the air – the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere – despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this.
Bret Easton Ellis
If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
Bret Easton Ellis
If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the reading of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
Bret Easton Ellis
The better you look, the more you see.
Bret Easton Ellis
Women aren't very bright," Rip says. "Studies have been done.
Bret Easton Ellis
I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind man's vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet again that I was a tourist here.
Bret Easton Ellis
You learn to move on without the people you love.
Bret Easton Ellis
I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.
Bret Easton Ellis
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 she drives up the onramp. She says, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I'm eighteen and it's December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair's clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than "I'm pretty sure Muriel is anorexic" or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blaire's car. All it comes down to is the fact that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.
Bret Easton Ellis
What? Did we end up hating each other? Did we end up the way we thought we always knew would? Did I end up wearing khakis because of that fucking ad?
Bret Easton Ellis
The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.
Bret Easton Ellis
The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.
Bret Easton Ellis
I want to stay," and then, more weakly, "Need some more sun."A fly from a batch of seaweed lands on a white, bony thigh. She doesn't slap at it. It doesn't go away."But there's no sun, dude." I tell her.I start to walk away. So what, I mutter under my breath. When she wants to come in, she will. Imagine a blind person dreaming. I head back up toward the house. Wonder if Griffin will stick around, if Mona made reservations for dinner, if Spin will call back. "I know what the word dead means," I whisper to myself as softly as I can because it sounds like an omen.
Bret Easton Ellis
what's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.
Bret Easton Ellis
Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead.
Bret Easton Ellis
I have to return some videotapes
Bret Easton Ellis