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.”

“This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”

“At first she was so inexpressive and indifferent that I wanted to know more about her. I envied that blankness - it was the opposite of helplessness or damage or craving or suffering or shame. But she was never really happy and already, in a matter of days, she had reached a stage in our relationship where she no longer really cared about me or any thoughts or ideas I might have had.”

“My nightly blood lust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage.”

“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.”

“...I feel anchored, calm, even with Evelyn sitting across from me prattling on about a very large Faberge egg she thought she saw at the Pierre, rolling around the lobby of its own accord or something like that.”

“I think a lot of snowflakes are alike...and I think a lot of people are alike too.”

“Patrick Bateman: I'm on a diet. Jean: What, you're kidding, right? You look great... so fit... and thin. Patrick Bateman: Well, you can always be thinner... look better. Jean: Then maybe we shouldn't go out to dinner. I wouldn't want you to lose your willpower. Patrick Bateman: That's okay. I'm not very good at controlling it anyway. Share this quote”

“My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone.”

“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 nog 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.”

“My books have all been very deeply felt. You don’t spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I’ve been serious. But I don’t do lots of things that other serious writers do. I don’t write book reviews. I don’t sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don’t go to writer conferences. I don’t teach writing seminars. I don’t hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I’m not concerned with my reputation as a writer and where I stand relative to other writers. I’m not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don’t think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I don’t think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal of greatness. 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.”

“This isn't a script," Julian says. "It's not going to add up. Not everything's going to come together in the third act.”

“I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care.”

“Nunca me ha gustado nadie y e da miedo la gente.”

“El silencio es una risa burlona. El silencio roba algo.”

“La noria vacía se alza ante nosotros ucando pasamos por su lado, un círculo impreciso apenas visible en la bruma, y, si exceptuamos unos pescadores mexicanos, no hay nadie alrededor.”

“Siempre existe la posibilidad de que ocurra algo aterrador, y normalmente ocurre.”

“Cada día hay todo un ejército de retrasadas impacientes por ser deshonradas.”

“El olor a castañas asadas se mezcla con el anhídrido carbónico de los escapes.”

“El pasado no es real. Sólo es un sueño.”

“Todo el mundo tiene meido. Pero si nos mantenemos unidos, si intentamos estar disponibles para los otros, ya no tendremos miedo.”

“(...) estaba tan por encima de la ciudad que tenías la impresión de contemplar un mundo enorme y abandonado que se extendía en cuadrículas anónimas, una vista que confirmaba que estabas mucho más solo de lo que creías.”

“Me mira fijamente, y la mirada que le devuelvo es el principio de todo, y me imagino el futuro: "¿Por qué me odias?", imagino que dice la voz angustiada de una chica. "¿Qué te he hecho?, imagino que grita otra persona.”

“¿Qué es lo peor que te ha pasado, Jimmy?", lee fuera de cuadro alguien que hace el papel de una chica llamada Claire. "El amor incondicional", responde el chico, y el personaje de Jimmy se vuelve con fingida vergüenza, pero el chico lee mal la frase, poniendo el énfasis donde no toca, sonriendo cuando debería haberse puesto totalmente serio, convirtiéndolo en el remate de un chiste cuando nunca lo ha sido.”

“I am gripped by an existential panic.”

“If all of your friends are morons is it afelony, a misdemeanor or an act of God ifyou blow their fucking heads off with athirty-eight magnum?”

“Thingschanging, failing apart, fading, another year, a few moremoves, a hard person who doesn't give a fuck, a boredom somonumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made bypeople you don't even know that it requires you to lose anysense of reality you might have once acquired, expectationsso unreasonable you become superstitious about evermatching them.”

“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.”

“Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?”

“The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything — all the pain I felt, the betrayal — I couldn't help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn't disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.”

“There's a moment of sheer panic when I discover Paul's apartment overlooks the park”

“There's a moment of sheer terror when I discover Paul's apartment overlooks the park”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you can’t make a girl come why even bother? That always seemed to me to be like writing questions in a letter.”

“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.”

“Akthent on thee latht thyllable.”

“When you love a book it loves you back.”

“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.”

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

“Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?”

“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.”

“You learn to move on without the people you love.”

“But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.”

“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.)”

“Baby, when you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to say live and let live. You know you did, you know you did, you know you did.”

“Who is this girl? Why is she alive? Wonder if I should leave right now. Get up and say, 'Goodnight fuck-ups, it's been a sheer sensation and I hope I never see any of you again,' and leave?”

“Keep everything young and soft, keep everything on the surface, even with the knowledge that the surface fades and can't be held together forever - take advantage before the expiration date appears in the nearing distance.”

“By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world.”

“...a flood of reality. I get an odd feeling that this is a crucial moment in my life and I'm startled by the suddenness of what I guess passes for an epiphany. There is nothing of value I can offer her. For the first time I see her as uninhibited; she seems stronger, less controllable, wanting to take me into a new and unfamiliar land - the dreaded uncertainty of a totally different world. I sense she wants to rearrange my life in a significant way - her eyes tell me this and though I see truth in them, I also know that one day, sometime very soon, she too will be locked in the rhythm of my insanity. All I have to do is keep silent about this and not bring it up - yet she weakens me, it's almost as if she's making the decision about who I am, and in my own stubborn, willful way I can admit to feeling a pang, something tightening inside, and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love. I wonder if even now, right here in Nowheres, she can see the darkening clouds behind my eyes lifting. And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will.”