Literary Birthday – 7 March – Bret Easton Ellis

Happy Birthday, Bret Easton Ellis, born 7 March 1964.

Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

1. The better you look, the more you see.
2. All of my books come from pain.
3. Life is like a typographical error: we’re constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.
4. Everyone I know who is successful has issues with their father, regardless of whether it was sports or business or entertainment.
5. 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.
6. If I see that a paragraph looks—just aesthetically, visually—too long and for some reason interrupts some narrative flow or fluidity, then I will break that paragraph up. Not necessarily because of the language or the words, but purely on a visual basis.
7. I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn’t thinking about them being movies.
8. No one is drawn to writing about being happy or feelings of joy.
9. Why would I care what other people are thinking? I don’t care what an audience thinks of me.
10. I don’t think that the movies hurt the reputation of my books, but I feel that literary novels don’t make good movies… I do, however, like the process of making a movie. The social and collaborative aspects of it I like, but it is a director’s medium, not a screenwriter’s medium. Writing a book is different because you have final cut, and you can do whatever you want.
11. After a while you learn that everything stops.
12. You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you.

Bret Easton Ellis is an American novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novels include Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho. Ellis often uses recurring characters and settings. Major characters in one novel may become minor ones in the next. According to Wikipedia: ‘Ellis’s novels have become increasingly metafictional. Lunar Park (2005), a pseudo-memoir and ghost story, received positive reviews. Imperial Bedrooms (2010), marketed as a sequel to Less than Zero, continues in this vein. The Shards (2023) is a fictionalised memoir of Ellis’s final year of high school in Los Angeles in 1981.’ Four of Ellis’s works have been made into films. His works have been translated into 30 languages. He is the host of The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. Follow him on Instagram.

Read Bret Easton Ellis’s 2 Bits Of Writing Advice

Source for image: Credit: Mark Coggins from San Francisco, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ellis.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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