Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.

People can get accustomed to anything, right? Habit does things to people.

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

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

I've forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where.

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.

What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists?

Yes. Yes I am. I am a completely demented misogynist.

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.

I've been accused of being very vain about my apathy.

I feel like I'm not smart enough to answer the questions I'm asked.

It's like my characters, all my men are Dad and me in a mess; all my female characters are smart and hopeful, like Mom just trying to make the best of things.

Adjust my dreams for me.

You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you

There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.

Rock 'n' roll. Deal with it.

I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

I am gripped by an existential panic.

Everyone I know who is successful has issues with their father, regardless of whether it was sports or business or entertainment.

It's because you're always fighting sentiment. You're fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way.

Open the hood of a car and it will tell you something about the people who designed it, is just one of many phrases I’m tortured by.

Unless you're the director on the movie, or putting up the money for the movie, you really don't have a lot of control.

I do not feel I have a legacy to protect.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

I could stay living in this city if they just installed Blaupunkts in the cabs.

My pain is constant and sharp...this confession has meant nothing

Completely committed to adapting 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. This is not a joke. Christian Grey and Ana: potentially great cinematic characters.

It's the rare book that's able to transport you in a way that a movie does.

If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies.

Hope E.L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.

Exploitation is a harsh word, I know that, but on a certain level, to me that is the central Hollywood story.

Fear never shows up and the party ends early.

And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention

I'm into, oh murders and executions mostly. It depends.

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

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

I think basically most men are misogynistic.

I don't know why I write what I write.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

And," Price adds, smiling, "if another round of Bellinis comes within a twenty-foot radius of our table we are going to set the maitre d' on fire. So you know, warn him.

What keeps me interested--and it always does--is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?

But... what about us? What about the past?" she asks blankly. "The past isn't real. it's just a dream," I say. "Don't mention the past.

Women aren't very bright," Rip says. "Studies have been done.

I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane?

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.

The numbing lists of things you were supposed to have as an American to make you happy, which ultimately, of course, don't. Those aren't the things that make you happy.

I laugh maniacally, then take a deep breath and touch my chest- expecting a heart to be thumping quickly, impatiently, but there's nothing there, not even a beat.

The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.