Quotes by Bret Easton Ellis

I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind mans vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet again that I was a tourist here.

Women arent very bright, Rip says. Studies have been done.

The better you look, the more you see.

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and youll 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.

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and youll 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.

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.

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.

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.

It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.

And it struck me then, that I liked Sean because he looked, well, slutty. A boy who had been around. A boy who couldnt remember if he was Catholic or not.

What you need is a chick from Camden, Van Patten says, after recovering from McDermotts statement.Oh great, I say. Some chick who thinks its okay to fuck her brother.Yeah, but they think AIDS is a new band from England, Price points out.Wheres dinner? Van Patten asks, absently studying the question scrawled on his napkin. Where the fuck are we going?Its really funny that girls think guys are concerned with that, with diseases and stuff, Van Patten says, shaking his head.Im not gonna wear a fucking condom, McDermott announces.I have read this article Ive 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.

... Because the writer resented that she had turned to me I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. Thats how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. Thats how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. Thats how I became the boy who wouldnt save a friend. Thats how I became the boy who couldnt love the girl.

He wasnt, 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 didnt seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that hed 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.

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 Newmans I Love L.A.

The audience-- the books 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 didnt give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didnt help) so the source material-- surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality-- had to be reshaped.

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.

She said that you-- I dont care what she said. I stand up. Everyone lies. Hey, he says softly. Its just a code. No. Everyone lies. I stub the cigarette out. Its just another language you have to learn. Then he delicately adds, I think you need some coffee, dude. Pause. Why are you so angry?

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 youve always lived.)

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.

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.