Latest Bret Easton Ellis Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Hurt, Mean, Tunes

  Interview with Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. April 22, 2009.

• 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.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Thinking, Looks, Way

  Interview with Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. April 22, 2009.

• 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.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Writing, Issues, Directors

  Interview with Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. April 22, 2009.

• 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.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. April 22, 2009.

• You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Writing, Criticism, Hobbies

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

• 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."

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Thinking, Narrators, Fiction

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

• 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.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Book, Writing, Past

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

• I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Smart, Believe, Narrators

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

• Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Writing, Years, Two

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

• I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Scene, Novel, Touched

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

• 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.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Book, Thinking, Looks

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

• I think in life, there are certain choices you make that are timeless and universal, and don't necessarily have anything to do with the particulars of a certain decade.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Thinking, Choices, Timeless

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

• 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.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Thinking, Choices, Looks

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.