Quotes from Bret Easton Ellis

outrage gets clicks, outrage can make your voice heard above the deafening din of voices squalling over one another in this nightmarish new culture—and the outrage is often tied to a lunacy demanding human perfection, spotless citizens, clean and likable

The angry and funny and outspoken pop star Morrissey is an anomaly, calling out contradictions and hypocrisies in society yet he always seems to be chastised by the press and on social media because he's speaking honestly and doesn't buy into the accepted narrative of the Applebee's Gay.)

Feelings aren't facts and opinions aren't crimes

This widespread epidemic of self-victimization—defining yourself in essence by way of a bad thing, a trauma that happened in the past that you've let define you—is actually an illness.

Have you ever wished that you could disappear from all this?

This was why it seemed to many of us in that summer that the Left was morphing into something it never had been in my lifetime: a morally superior, intolerant and authoritarian party that was out of touch and lacked any coherent ideology beyond its blanket refusal to credit an election in which someone they didn't approve of had, at least legally, technically, won the White House. The Left had become a rage machine, burning itself up: a melting blue bubble dissolving in on itself.

Liberalism used to concern itself with freedoms I'd aligned myself with, but during the 2016 campaigns, it finally hardened into a warped authoritarian moral superiority movement that I didn't want to have anything to do with.

Animals need as much love and respect and care as we give people. I consider this. I think about all the things I've seen and done, and I consider this. I think they're better off without that, baby, I say. In fact I think they're doing okay.

The question for him now had become: Well, were any of them really his friends in the first place? If they could ditch him so completely over Trump, maybe they never had been. He'd often wondered: Was this really all it took? Was defending the president you had supported and voted for that immoral and outrageous? Apparently, for some on the Left this was reason enough to abandon a friend or a relative or even an acquaintance.

My friend also noted that it was harder to meet girls online here in blue-state California, where it seemed "Where do you stand politically?" had become the question most frequently asked by females, replacing the previous: "How tall are you?

I thought I was going to cry but it passed

Across the board, identity politics endorse the concept that people are essentially tribal, and our differences are irreconcilable, which of course makes diversity and inclusion impossible. This is the toxic dead-end of identity politics; it's a trap.

Okay, even though you think Erasure is a good band, I think I can still trust you." "They are, Victor, and—

just wasn't that interested in politics. Or else, as many would say, it was easier because I was a white privileged male. Or possibly because I'm simply a grown man, no longer a child, and understood that the world didn't always behave precisely as we wanted it to and also that people weren't all the same. I was far more interested in what people were really like, not who they voted for.

The next morning over a breakfast of bran muffins and kiwi and Evian water and wheatgrass juice, Ann mentioned something about buying a BMW and I had to hold back a scream. It was clear that this had not been my best term; it was clear that I was losing it

The feminist reaction to Playboy seemed unfair because our options pre-internet were so severely limited—maybe a couple issues of a magazine per month—that to apply moral criticism to our desires seemed cruel.

Why did the killer stalk the sorority girls in Black Christmas? Why was Regan possessed in The Exorcist? Why was the shark cruising around Amity? Where did Carrie White's powers come from? There were no answers, just as there were no concrete connect-the-dot justifications of daily life's randomness: shit happens, deal with it, stop whining, take your medicine, grow the fuck up.

Someone named Angel was supposed to go with us tonight, but earlier today she got caught in the drain of her jacuzzi and almost drowned.

You have neither the clout nor the experience to make a threat like that, Victor.

And a new irony had entered the picture: I was now hearing about how irritating the Left had become from people on the Left. One evening over drinks someone sighed to me, "I don't know how we got so annoying." And at a dinner a middle-aged liberal scoffed, "Oh, I can't deal with the Resistance anymore"—and this from a gay man who'd been a proud member of it.

Once upon a time I was liberal. Well, to be honest, less than a year ago I was still a liberal," he announced in a video. "But I reject a system which allows an ambitious, misinformed, dogmatic group to suppress free speech, create false narratives and apathetically steamroll over the truth. I reject hate. These are the reasons why I became a liberal. And these are the same reasons why I am now walking away.

I poked fun at rich friends growling about the unfairness of the Electoral College over a dinner at Spago that cost thousands of dollars, and took Meryl Streep to task for her outraged anti-Trump speech at the Golden Globes the same week she'd put her Greenwich Village townhouse on the market for thirty million dollars.

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.

I had no idea that 'Less Than Zero' was going to be read by anyone outside of Los Angeles, and it's - believe me, as the writer of the book I'm somewhat amused and intrigued by the idea that 25 years later it's still out and people are still reading it.