Bret Easton Ellis Quotes - Page 5

I could stay living in this city if they just installed Blaupunkts in the cabs.

Fear never shows up and the party ends early.

I learned that you really don't have any control as a writer. Waah, waah, waah. Big deal. Unless you're the director on the movie, or putting up the money for the movie, you really don't have a lot of control. As someone who's just writing scripts, you just kind of have to shrug. I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general. It is what it is.

If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies.

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.

But... what about us? What about the past?" she asks blankly. "The past isn't real. it's just a dream," I say. "Don't mention the past.

Are you as much of a criminal if you don't act when there's a crime taking place in front of you as you are one of the participants? That was something that I was thinking about a lot because there are many moments in 'Less Than Zero' where horrific things happen and Clay could do something about them, but his passivity stops him.

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.

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.

My pain is constant and sharp...this confession has meant nothing

I think the '80s created me, in a way, when I look back on that time, but I don't necessarily think that a lot of my choices, and a lot of things that I did, and a lot of things that happened to me - or I let happen to me - were about that decade.

What keeps me interested--and it always does--is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?

And," Price adds, smiling, "if another round of Bellinis comes within a twenty-foot radius of our table we are going to set the maitre d' on fire. So you know, warn him.

I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.

Hip," I murmur, remembering last night, how I lost it completely in a stall at Nell's---my mouth foaming, all I could think about were insects, lots of insects, and running at pigeons, foaming at the mouth and running at pigeons.

I laugh maniacally, then take a deep breath and touch my chest- expecting a heart to be thumping quickly, impatiently, but there's nothing there, not even a beat.

If you start looking at movies on a moral level - "I don't like that, that hurts, that's mean, that's bad" - then I don't even want to talk to you. Or like, someone that says "I don't like science-fiction movies," or "I don't want to sit through a Western," or "I don't like violence in movies," then I completely tune out.

I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.

I think the books are the books. They were conceived as books. They weren't conceived as movies. When I write scripts, that's an idea and a situation that I think is a really good idea for a movie. When I'm writing a book, I'm not thinking, "Oh, this would be a great movie." This would be a very interesting book. And I think the books are things that cannot really be adapted into another medium.

Completely committed to adapting 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. This is not a joke. Christian Grey and Ana: potentially great cinematic characters.

The numbing lists of things you were supposed to have as an American to make you happy, which ultimately, of course, don't. Those aren't the things that make you happy.

I went to college in Vermont, and then stayed in the East Coast.

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.

Exploitation is a harsh word, I know that, but on a certain level, to me that is the central Hollywood story.