Explore Quotes by Bret Easton Ellis

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

...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.

Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.

What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.

A great numb feeling washes over me as I let go of the past and look forward to the future. Pretend to be a vampire. I don't really need to pretend, because it's who I am, an emotional vampire. I've just come to expect it. Vampires are real. That I was born this way. That I feed off of other people's real emotions. Search for this night's prey. Who will it be?

There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead.

The snowy owl has eyes that look just like mine, especially when it widens them. And while I stand there, staring at it, lowering my sunglasses, something unspoken passes between me and the bird - there's this weird kind of tension, a bizarre pressure, that fuels the following, which starts, happens, ends, very quickly.

I write books to relieve ­myself of pain. That's the prime motivator to write. Period.

I'm not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he's not in the mood and doesn't feel the juice. I don't think discipline equals creativity.

With "Taipei" Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation...

I went to college in Vermont, and then stayed in the East Coast.

Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

I think basically most men are misogynistic.

History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad.

I totally relate to Tom Cruise. He's not crazy, it's just the litany of the mid-life crisis.

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.

Why would I care what other people are thinking? I don't care what an audience thinks of me.

Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or another, working through my feelings at the time.

Where there was nature and earth, life and water, 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.