The heroin flowing through me, I thought about the last time I saw my father alive. He was drunk and overweight in a restaurant in Beverly Hills, and curling into myself on the bed I thought: What if I had done something that day? I had just sat passively in a restaurant booth as the midday light filled the half-empty dining room, pondering a decision. The decision was: should you disarm him? That was the word I remember: disarm. Should you tell him something that might not be the truth but would get the desired reaction? And what was I going to convince him of, even though it was a lie? Did it matter? Whatever it was, it would constitute a new beginning. The immediate line: You’re my father and I love you. I remember staring at the white tablecloth as I contemplated saying this. Could I actually do it? I didn’t believe it, and it wasn’t true, but I wanted it to be. For one moment, as my father ordered another vodka (it was two in the afternoon; this was his fourth) and started ranting about my mother and the slump in California real estate and how “your sisters” never called him, I realized it could actually happen, and that by saying this I would save him. I suddenly saw a future with my father. But the check came along with the drink, and I was knocked out of my reverie by an argument he wanted to start, and I simply stood up and walked away from the booth without looking back at him or saying goodbye, and then I was standing in sunlight. Loosening my tie as a parking valet pulled up to the curb in the cream-colored 450 SL. I half smiled at the memory, for thinking that I could just let go of the damage that a father can do to a son. I never spoke to him again.

— Bret Easton Ellis

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.

— Bret Easton Ellis

The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the soundtrack.

— Bret Easton Ellis

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.

— Bret Easton Ellis

This is laid down with a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince of Michael Jackson--or any other black artist of the recent years for that matter--has come up with.

— Bret Easton Ellis

This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire—meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. 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 …

— Bret Easton Ellis

What? Did we end up hating each other? Did we end up the way we thought we always knew would? Did I end up wearing khakis because of that fucking ad?

— Bret Easton Ellis

What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest.' What do you do?'' What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?'' Why not?' She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.' Because... I don't know,' she sighs. I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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.

— Bret Easton Ellis