Quotes from Bret Easton Ellis

If I often wished the world were a different place, I also knew—and horror movies helped reinforce this—that it never would be, a realization that in turn led me to a mode of acceptance.

How easy it would be to scare the living wits out of this fucking guy. Kimball is utterly unaware of how truly vacant I am. There is no evidence of animate life in this office, yet still he takes notes. By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world. I would like a Pilsner Urquell.

We seem to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing their true selves. In other words: the actor's dream.

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 am simply not there.

Certainly, in the spring of 2013 I hadn't fucked up as many gay lives as Bill Clinton had.

once you start choosing how people can and cannot express themselves then this opens the door to a very dark room in the corporation from which there's really no escape. Can't they in return police your thoughts, and then your feelings and then your impulses? And, finally, can they police, ultimately, your dream?

just cool it with the anti-semitic remarks.

Feelings aren't facts and opinions aren't crimes and aesthetics still count—and the reason I'm a writer is to present an aesthetic, things that are true without always having to be factual or immutable.

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

Listen," I say, my voice trembling with emotion, "have whatever you want but I'm telling you I recommend the Diet Pepsi.

Como Jean poderia compreender que nada pode me desapontar porque não acho nada digno de ser desejado?

It was when she started dealing coke so she could lose weight. It had worked, sort of. I think she still has a fat ass, and can look dumpy, and has dried-out black hair and writes awful poetry and I'm pissed off that I let her get into that position of denying me.

and reduce the influence of political action committees.

I was now looking at a new kind of liberalism, one that willingly censored people and punished voices, obstructed opinions and blocked viewpoints.

At our last session – yesterday, in fact – the psychiatrist I've been seeing for the past two months asked, What method of contraception do you and Evelyn use? and I sighed before answering, my eyes fixed out the window on a skyscraper, then at the painting above the Turchin glass coffee table, a giant visual reproduction of a graphic equalizer by another artist, not Onica. Her job.

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.

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.

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.

You don't think it's"– and now she looks around the restaurant before leaning in, whispering–"AIDS?" "Oh no, nothing like that," I say, though immediately I wish I had paused long enough before answering to scare her. "Just . . . general . . . brain"—I bite the tip off an herbed breadstick and shrug—"injuries.

I mean I tell her I'm sensitive. I told her I was freaked out by the Challenger accident—

I would demand to wear Ray-Ban sunglasses. Expensive Ray-Bans," I say carefully. "In fact I would demand that everyone would have to wear Ray-Ban sunglasses.

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 … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged

This was sending me out so much further than I had ever expected: a place beyond strength.

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