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Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

Total quotes: 21
“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...”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Evil, Surface, God is dead
“I was lost in the anxiety of the moment. I was crying and trying not to breathe too loudly.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
Tagged: anxiety in literature, The Feeling of Anxiety, Anxiety
“I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of nonfiction as I could in any of my novels and so I gave up.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Fiction Is Non-Fiction, Reality Hunger, Identity Construction, Fiction Writing, Narrative Fallacy, Lies as Truth
“How could she ever understand that there isn't any way I could be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to?”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
“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. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Self Discovery
“The new trend is no trend.”
— Victor Ward, Glamorama
“… There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Identity, Nihilism
“An especially loud New Order song comes from the open windows at McCullough, ‘Your Silent Face.’ Sean liked this song, so did Mitchell in fact. Gerald says, ‘Jesus, I really hate this song.’ I kiss him once more. It turns out to be the last song of the party. It fades out, nothing replaces it.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction
Tagged: References to Songs In Literature and Books, New Order
“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero
Tagged: first lines of books
“I was relaxed in the suburbs. Everything was different: the rhythm of the days, your social status, suspicions about people. It was a refuge for the less competitive; it was the minor leagues. You simply didn’t have to pay as much attention to things.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: The Suburbs
“You do an awfully good impression of yourself.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
Tagged: first lines of books
“My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Tagged: Pain, Suffering, Hatred
“I walk away, hailing a taxi, and heading toward Hubert's in it I hallucinate the buildings into mountains, into volcanoes, the streets become jungles, the sky freezes into a backdrop, and before stepping out of the cab I have to cross my eyes in order to clear my vision. Lunch at Hubert's becomes a permanent hallucination in which I find myself dreaming while still awake.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Hallucinate
“And it’s a story that might bore you but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or, actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or a Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie. She actually had her eye on someone else that night: Daniel Miller, a Senior, a Drama major, only a little gay, with blond hair, a great body and these amazing gray eyes, but he was seeing this beautiful French girl from Ohio, and he eventually got mono and went to Europe and never finished his Senior year.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction
Tagged: Virginity, Losing Your Virginity, College, first lines of books, NYU In Literature, Long Intro Sentences to Fiction Books, Camden College
“There was no system to any of this. At that point Chloe Byrnes wasn't a real person to me and on that afternoon in the house on Ocean Drive a few decisions had to be made, the priority being: I would never dream of leaving any of this. At first I was confused by what passed for love in this world: people were discarded because they were too old or too fat or too poor or they had too much hair or not enough, they were wrinkled, they had no muscles, no definition, no tone, they weren't hip, they weren't remotely famous. This was how you chose lovers. This was what decided friends. And I had to accept this if I wanted to get anywhere. When I looked over at Chloe, she shrugged. I observed the shrug. She mouthed the words Take … a … hike … On the verge of tears — because I was dealing with the fact that we lived in a world where beauty was considered an accomplishment — I turned away and made a promise to myself: to be harder, to not care, to be cool. The future started mapping itself out and I focused on it. In that moment I felt as if I was disappearing from pool-side in the villa on Ocean Drive and I was floating above the palm trees, growing smaller in the wide blank sky until I no longer existed and relief swept over me with such force I sighed.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama
Tagged: Vanishing Point
“There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being— flesh, blood, skin, hair— but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the 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. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why— I couldn't put my finger on it.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Identity
“There are so many things Blair doesn’t get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away – I now want to explain these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone.”
— Clay Easton, Imperial Bedrooms (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: How Bret Easton Ellis Ends His Books, Mirrors
“I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. 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 love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term 'generosity of spirit' applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Tagged: Desert, Nihilism, Vanishing Point
“Later, predictably, she's tied to the floor, naked, on her back, both feet, both hands, tied to makeshift posts that are connected to boards which are weighted down with metal. The hands are shot full of nails and her legs are spread as wide as possible. A pillow props her ass up and cheese, Brie, has been smeared across her open cunt, some of it even pushed up into the vaginal cavity. She's barely gained consciousness and when she sees me, standing over her, naked, I can imagine that my virtual absence of humanity fills her with mind-bending horror. I've”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
“A young girl, a freshman, I met in a bar in Cambridge my junior year at Harvard told me early one fall that 'Life is full of endless possibilities.' I tried valiantly not to choke on the beer nuts I was chewing while she gushed this kidney stone of wisdom, and I calmly washed them down with the rest of a Heineken, smiled and concentrated on the dart game that was going on in the corner. Needless to say, she did not live to see her sophomore year. That winter, her body was found floating in the Charles River, decapitated, her head hung from a tree on the bank, her hair knotted around a low-hanging branch, three miles away.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho
Tagged: Hope
“Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, ‘Be My Baby’ on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.”
— Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Tagged: first lines of books
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