Bret Easton Ellis Quoted

Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is an American author. He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney. He is a self-proclaimed "moralist," although he is one of his generation's most controversial authors because of his excessively violent and sexually bizarre content. Although influenced by French literary giants like Flaubert and Balzac, Ellis' value as a novelist is more social than aesthetic, depicting the grotesque materialism, status obsession, and social transgression of affluent American youth in the 1980's. also employs their technique of linking novels with common, recurring characters. (wiki page)

Biography

He was born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles and raised in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, the son of Robert Martin Ellis, a wealthy property developer, and Dale Ellis, a homemaker. His parents divorced in 1982. He was educated at The Buckley School, where he did not distinguish himself; then he took a music-based course at Bennington College in Vermont, which is thinly disguised as Camden Arts College in his novel The Rules of Attraction and his other books. He was a part-time musician in 1980s bands such as The Parents before his first book was published. Less Than Zero, a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles, was praised by critics and sold well (50,000 copies in its first year). He moved to New York City in 1987 for the publication of his second novel.

The Rules of Attraction followed a group of sexually promiscuous college students, and sold fairly well, though Ellis admits he felt he had "fallen off", after the novel failed to match the success of his debut effort.

His most controversial work, the graphically violent novel American Psycho, was intended to be published by Simon & Schuster, but they withdrew after external protests from groups such as the NOW and many others due to the misogynistic nature of the book. The novel was later published by Vintage. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is both a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and a serial killer, to be an example of transgressive art. American Psycho has achieved considerable cult status.

His collection of short stories, The Informers, contains vignettes of wayward Los Angeles characters ranging from rock stars to vampires.

The novel Glamorama is set in the world of high fashion, following a male model who becomes entangled in a bizarre terrorist organization comprised entirely of other models. The book plays with themes of media, celebrity, and political violence, and like its predecessor American Psycho it uses surrealism to convey a sense of postmodern dread.

His most recent novel is Lunar Park, which uses the form of a celebrity memoir to tell a ghost story about the novelist "Bret Easton Ellis" and his chilling experiences in the apparently-haunted home he shares with his wife and son. In keeping with his usual style, Ellis mixes absurd comedy with a bleak and violent vision.

The Quotes

General

• "I read it for the first time in about 20 years this year–-recently. It wasn't so bad. I get it. I get fan mail now from people who weren't really born yet when the book came out. I don't think it's a perfect book by any means, but it's valid. I get where it comes from. I get what it is. I know that sounds so ambiguous. It's sort of out of my hands and it has its reputation so what can you do about it? There's a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written. Overall, I was pretty shocked. It was pretty good writing for someone who was 19. I was pretty surprised by the level of writing."

- On Less Than Zero

• "It might be my favorite book of mine. It was a very exciting time in my life. I was writing that book while I was at college. Sort of like the best of times, the worst of times. There was a lot of elation, there was a lot of despair. It was just a really fun book to write. I loved mimicking all the different voices. The stream of conscious does get a little out of hand. I kind of like that about the book. It's kind of all over the place. It's casual. It's scruffy. That's the one book of mine that I have a very, very soft spot for."
  

- On The Rules of Attraction

• "I reread that book in the summer of '03. . . . And I hadn't looked at that book either since '91. And I was dreading it. I thought it was going to be a really terrible novel. Everything everyone had ever said about it was going to be true. . . . And I started reading it... and I was surprised. It was good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. Not nearly as weighted down with the importance that I thought I was investing it with. I found it really fast-moving. I found it really funny. And I liked it a lot. The violence was... it made my toes curl. I really freaked out. I couldn't believe how violent it was. It was truly upsetting. I had to steel myself to reread those passages."

- On American Psycho

• "It's definitely the book that I can tell—I don't know if other people can tell but I can tell as a writer–-is probably the most divisive that I've written. It has an equal number of detractors as it does fans. It doesn't really hold true with the other books. It was the one that took the longest to write, and the one that seemed the most important at the time. It's an unwieldy book... I like it."
  

- On Glamorama

• “I like the idea of a writer being haunted by his own creation, especially if the writer resents the way the character defines him.”


• "Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here."


• "Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. "


• “I feel like I'm not smart enough to answer the questions I'm asked.”


• “I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.”


• “You simply didn't have to pay as much attention to things. The precise pose was no longer required.”


• “I'm not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he's not in the mood and doesn't feel the juice. I don't think that discipline equals creativity.”


• “Mailer is a genius. He's the one I most connect with in terms of fiction — his range is so wide. That's the sort of boldness I aspire to.”


• “It should have been written already,”


• “We were all such Didion junkies in college that might still be the highlight of my career.”


• “I hadn't published a book in six years so I didn't know what to expect. It has been going very well. They've all been packed.”


• “Fun is what reading a book should be. I had fun writing it. I wanted a reader to be gripped but it shouldn't be a heavy experience.”


• “As a writer you slant all evidence in favor of the conclusions you want to produce, and you rarely tilt in favor of the truth.”


• “[Stepping out from the shadow of Psycho , and such other iconic works as Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction , has been difficult for Ellis.] I had spent 10 years working on an outline about a writer very much like myself, ... He was a fictional writer who had written fictional books, one about a serial killer. He'd had hard times, drug and alcohol problems, and had fathered an 11-year-old boy. Something was stopping me from writing the book. Then I thought, this guy has similarities to you, why don't you make him you?”


• “The writer in the new novel is haunted by everything - his father, the things he wrote. American Psycho haunts me and it will be on my gravestone. That's why it is such an important part of Lunar Park .”


• “I totally relate to Tom Cruise, ... He's not crazy, it's just the litany of the mid-life crisis.”


• “I'm a believer that a book should exist on its own.”


• “Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.”


• “Lunar Park came out of wanting to write a Stephen King novel. In 1989, I wanted to write two genre novels. I wanted to write a Stephen King novel and a Robert Ludlum novel. I loved those genres and those writers."

• "I've always thought that as long as narrators are interesting, likability is not an issue."

• "You can't stand over every reader, saying, "See this part here? That's supposed to be funny. You're not supposed to be so grossed out or so offended by it..."

Less Than Zero

• "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles."


• "I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don't remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is "Disappear Here" and even though it's probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light."

The Rules of Attraction

• "What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me. "


• "...and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin's room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or Junior and usually somestimes at her boyfriend's place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed to Get Screwed party, or a townie."


• "I only had sex with her because I'm in love with you. "


• "A great numb feeling washes over me as I let go of the past and look forward to the future. Pretend to be a vampire. I don't really need to pretend, because it's who I am, an emotional vampire. I've just come to expect it. Vampires are real. That I was born this way. That I feed off of other people's real emotions. Search for this night's prey. Who will it be?"


• "Got you. You're mine now. For the rest of the day, week, month, year, life. Have you guessed who I am? Sometimes I think you have. Sometimes when you're standing in a crowd I feel those sultry, dark eyes of yours stop on me. Are you too afraid to come up to me and let me know how you feel? I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings. I want to kill the ugly girls that you're always with. Do you really like those boring, naive, coy, calculating girls or is it just for sex? The seeds of love have taken hold, and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone."


• "And it struck me then, that I liked Sean because he looked, well, slutty. A boy who had been around. A boy who couldn't remember if he was Catholic or not."

American Psycho

• "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so."


• "…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a non contingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing…."


• "I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning"


• "I'm into, oh murders and executions mostly. It depends."


• "There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing. "


• "A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety. It's as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there... is... no... key."


• "'What you need is a chick from Camden,' Van Patten says, after recovering from McDermott's statement.
  
  'Oh great,' I say. 'Some chick who thinks it's okay to fuck her brother.'
  
  'Yeah, but they think AIDS is a new band from England,' Price points out.
  
  'Where's dinner?' Van Patten asks, absently studying the question scrawled on his napkin. 'Where the fuck are we going?'
  
  'It's really funny that girls think guys are concerned with that, with diseases and stuff,' Van Patten says, shaking his head.
  
  'I'm not gonna wear a fucking condom,' McDermott announces.
  
  'I have read this article I've Xeroxed,' Van Patten says, 'and it says our chances of catching that are like zero zero zero zero point half a decimal percentage or something, and this no matter what kind of scumbag, slutbucket, horndog chick we end up boffing.'
  
  'Guys just cannot get it.'
  
  'Well, not white guys.'"


• ""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."


• ""Hello, Halberstam," Owen says, walking by.
  "Hello, Owen," I say, admiring the way he's styled and slicked back his hair, with a part so even and sharp it... devastates me and I make a mental note to ask him where he purchases his hair-care products, which kind of mousse he uses, my final guesses after mulling over the possibilities being Ten-X."


• "Disintegration---I'm taking it in stride."


• "And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea..."


• "I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip."

The Informers

• "Just read this fabulous screenplay. A remake of Camus's The Stranger with Meursault as a bi break-dancing punk rocker. Randy showed it to me. I loved it. Randy thinks "basically unfilmable" and that filming an orange rolling around a parking lot for three hours would draw a bigger audience."


• "I keep feeling that people are becoming less human and more animalistic. They seem to think less and feel less so that everyone is operating on a very primitive level. I wonder what you and I will see in our lifetimes. It seems so hopeless yet we must keep on trying ... I guess we can't escape being a product of the times, can we?"

Glamorama

• "The better you look, the more you see."


• "We'll slide down the surface of things..."


• "'As a genereal rule you shouldn't expect too much from people darling,' and then i kiss her on the cheek.
  
  'I just had my makeup done, so you can't make me cry.'"


• Specks—-specks all over the third panel, see?—-no, that one—-the second one up from the floor and I wanted to point this out to someone yesterday but a photo shoot intervened and Yaki Nakamari or whatever the hell the designer's name is—-a master craftsman not—-mistook me for someone else so I couldn't register the complaint, but, gentlemen—-and ladies—-there they are: specks, annoying, tiny specks, and they don't look accidental but like they were somehow done by a machine—-so I don't want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don't leave out why, though I'm getting the distinct impression by the looks on your sorry faces that why won't get answered—-now, come on, goddamnit, what's the story?

Lunar Park

• "You do an awfully good impression of yourself."


• "I hear today's college women are 'prodigious.'"
  "Prodigious? Is that what you heard?"
  "Well, I read it in a magazine. It was something I wanted to believe."
  "The Jayster. Always a dreamer."


• "Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way."

Bret Easton Ellis Does an Awfully Good Impression of Himself

Dave Weich, Powells.com

In 1985, twenty-one-year-old Bret Easton Ellis published Less than Zero. Written while he was still at college, the searing debut earned rapturous praise, including head-turning comparisons to Salinger, Fitzgerald, and Fellini.

Six years, two books, and countless tabloid appearances later, Ellis served up American Psycho. The shocking story of fictional serial killer Patrick Bateman firmly divided literary camps in two: Simon and Schuster refused to publish the novel, forfeiting a six-figure advance; Fay Weldon, meanwhile, writing in the Washington Post, called it "a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel...a seminal book."

Now Ellis's first novel in seven years takes aim at no less a target than the author's own public persona. Lunar Park grafts the black humor of his nineties work onto an intoxicating, pseudo-autobiographical plot that will send readers scurrying hungrily from its pages in search of source material to divine fact from fiction.

Lunar Park is "remarkable in scope and plot," Georgie Lewis applauds, "an almost masochistic metafiction in which the author plays himself as a suburban dad paying gruesome penance for being Bret Easton Ellis. Always controversial, as much loved as despised, Ellis has matured here and the result is gothic and sublime."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dave: I think your press kit was the first I've received that included negative reviews. There were plenty of good reviews and admiring profiles, too, but the mix played well in relation to the content of Lunar Park, which is to say that readers and critics have very strong reactions to your work.

Bret Easton Ellis: I haven't seen the press kit, but it's cool that they put some negative reviews in there to give people an idea of just how divisive I am for audiences. I really couldn't tell you why that is. It's nice when the reviews are good, but when they're negative it doesn't negate the fun that I had writing the book, or the reasons that I had for writing it. I'm not often bothered by negative reviews.

I guess I've had to come up with theories as to why people react so strongly. I see so many books that are much more poorly written than mine, and no one seems to get too upset about them. It has to do with the material, I think. And some of it might have to do with a resentment about my career, though it really shouldn't; I don't sell as many books as a lot of my contemporaries.

Dave: You're certainly not afraid to push buttons.

Ellis: Involuntarily, I guess.

Dave: But in terms of the subjects you write about.

Ellis: But that suggests a calculation on getting a response, and that's not generally why I'm writing a book. If I wanted to do that I would go into even more hardcore areas. I don't think I'm anywhere near the stuff Chuck Palahniuk writes, for instance. He writes some of the most upsetting things I've ever come across, and yet he's not nearly as reviled.

Maybe it has something to do with the persona of Bret Easton Ellis that was put out there; that was bothersome to some people. Maybe it was having success so early that annoyed and bothered people, and made critics and other writers much more sensitive about my work.

Dave: Did putting yourself at the center of Lunar Park ratchet up the stakes for you?

Ellis: It completely did, but it wasn't part of the game plan until really late in the day.

I was going to write about a man who moves into a house that he realizes is haunted. It was going to be a haunted house book. I wanted to write something fun. I'd been with Patrick Bateman for three years. Not that American Psycho wasn't fun to write, but it went into a lot of dark places, and I was really angry when I wrote that book. That's probably why it works.

At the time, I didn't think I was old enough to write Lunar Park—I knew that the narrator was married with kids, and they were all living in this house together—but I wanted to write a book that took me back to the enjoyment I got as a kid reading genre fiction, Stephen King and Robert Ludlum, so I thought, Wait a little while. I know Victor Ward better. I know that scene better. And I was really at the height of my disgust with celebrity culture, or so I thought at the time. International espionage fiction, I went with that one first; and Glamorama took a long time to write.

I wanted to write this book, but the narrator wasn't me in '89 or '95 or '98 or '99. There were a lot of autobiographical elements—he had written a book like American Psycho; a character from that book had escaped, quote-unquote, and was wreaking havoc —but it was another guy.

In the summer of 2000, I was stuck, and I didn't understand why. I had about a thousand pages of outlines when I decided, Okay, it's Bret Easton Ellis. Don't call him a fictional writer. Name the titles of your books.

In some ways, it's too bad because in the opening pages I had done some funny parodies of my own work. Those aren't now in the book. I had a lot of fun making fun of myself through a fictional character, but it felt dishonest, like I was hiding behind something. The minute I decided to go full-out and make myself the narrator, I got inspired.

I also thought it was going to help ground some of the more outlandish or supernatural aspects of the book, make them vaguely more realistic and give them more of a documentary feel. That would be a big technical plus.

Dave: Much of American Psycho put me in the mind of Money by Martin Amis. Both novels are propelled by what feels more like a flow than a plot; the hooks aren't as clear as they might be in another novel. Also, in both cases we're dealing with a narrator we probably can't trust, and someone the reader will have a hard time liking.

You take that on in pretty much all your work: your narrators are rarely likable.

Ellis: That's true, but I'm not really thinking about the likeability of a character. I'm thinking, Is he interesting to me? Does he sum up all my feelings about the themes of the book and what I'm trying to do?

The impetus to write the first four books came from a satirical place; the characters, from Clay [in Less than Zero] on to Victor Ward [in Glamorama], the kids in The Rules of Attraction and even Patrick Bateman, were summations of everything I didn't like about whatever I was satirizing at the time, whether it was youth culture, the college experience, the eighties, the nineties...

Those books came from a place of anger and frustration. I was disgusted with society and I was going to share my disgust. That was not the case with Lunar Park. It's not a satirical novel. There's some light satire in there about living in the suburbs and about modern parenting, but basically it was going to be a ghost story. And it was about dealing with my father's death.

That doesn't absolve the narrator of Lunar Park from being a mess. He's someone it takes a long time to warm up to, if readers warm up to him at all. Who wrote this in a review?—someone called the Bret Easton Ellis character in Lunar Park "an endearing dufus."

But there's a part of everyone I've written about that I like, even Patrick Bateman—and more when I reread the book in '03. I thought his anger was justified; I thought his misery was justified; I thought the implied criticism of the society he was around was valid; and I was amazed on my second reading of the book since its publication to find him at times a sympathetic guy that I could connect with. But I've always thought that as long as narrators are interesting, likeability is not an issue.

Dave: When Glamorama was published, Rolling Stone said, "The real bleakness in [your] books doesn't so much derive from the terrible things that sometimes happen as from the way nothing seems to matter more than anything else."

That's incisive, and it speaks to the fact that some readers don't make a distinction between the characters or events and the authorial perspective. Parts of American Psycho are hilarious. The other day I was giving a play-by-play of the scene in the Chinese laundry.

Ellis: But a lot of people don't read books that way, I found out, and there's really nothing you can do about it. You can't stand over every reader, saying, "See this part here? That's supposed to be funny. You're not supposed to be so grossed out or so offended by it..."

I always thought the tonal qualities were humorous in nature, even though horrible things happen. And ultimately the horror does overwhelm in every instance, but I do think most of the books start out funny.

Dave: How can you not laugh at Victor? He's so over the top.

Ellis: Completely. It is so over the top. But, actually, if you've hung out with people like that...

Victor is probably the least like me of any of my characters, but I fell for him also. I sympathized with him, even though he could be a raging moron and an asshole. Ultimately, I thought he became a sympathetic character. Everyone else moved on or died. I thought he learned something about himself at the end of that book.

Dave: Are there other books about cocaine culture that you would recommend?

Ellis: Those really aren't the books that I like to read. Drug books usually don't interest me because they tend to get lost in their own drugginess. Everyone always referred to Less than Zero as a drug book; I didn't ever see it that way. The characters did a lot of drugs, but personally I've never been interested in exploring drugs and what drugs mean.

Dave: Which distinguishes your novels and the culture you inhabited from some that came before, the counterculture of the sixties, for instance. Drugs for you weren't about expanding consciousness. They were about having fun.

Ellis: It was purely social. I wasn't making a statement. I wasn't learning anything, which was fine with me. I made a lot of friends and had a lot of good times, but there's a moment when the party stops. It's different for everybody, but eventually it's not so fun anymore. There have been a couple casualties along the way. You get older, and it takes longer to recover. It's not a big loss.

Dave: A lot of authors say that they write what they like to read.

Ellis: I definitely write the book that I want to read, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I like writers who write like me or write about the same subject or have the same stylistic approach. I like all kinds of books. I can name dozens of writers and dozens of books that I've read recently and loved, but none of them have anything to do with my work.

I can see the connections between the first half of this book and Philip Roth. I was reading a lot of his work, and I began channeling him, especially in those long, self-lacerating paragraphs. And there are all the Stephen King references in the second half of the book. Those were two writers I liked that influenced this particular novel.

When I was writing Glamorama, I was at the height of my passion for Don DeLillo; he was definitely an inspiration. I dug his work. (People no longer say that—that's such an anachronistic word: dug.)

The books I like most from my generation of writers are The Corrections, Kavalier and Clay, Fortress of Solitude... None of those shares a lot in common with what I do.

Probably my two greatest reading experiences of last year were Middlemarch, for the first time, and The Great Gatsby, finally understanding why it's the best American novel. It took me until forty to understand the horror of that book.

Dave: Why do you think that is?

Ellis: You have to have lost a lot, I think, to tap into that book emotionally. And you have to firmly grasp how money shapes everything— that's really at the heart of it. When they pass that book out to fourteen-year-olds in high school, I don't know what they're thinking. Because I wanted to be a writer, I admired the book, and there were passages that were very beautiful. I thought it was a good story. And I thought, I'm kind of rooting for Nick, and Tom's an asshole, and Daisy is such a sweet woman.

My God, they're all murderers! At forty, they're all murderers. There's a pile of bodies at the end of that book a mile high. It's a horror story. It's so bleak, so dark. I didn't grasp it even at thirty-two when I reread it, definitely not in my twenties when I reread it a couple times, and certainly not in high school.

Dave: Going to Bennington turned out to be such an important decision for you. Where else did you apply? Did you have a notion in mind of the college experience you were seeking?

Ellis: I was not a good student in high school. I was only interested in reading books and writing, and I liked to play music. I was in bands. That was my life. I ignored everything else, which is why I ended up with one of the lowest GPAs in my high school.

Dad, with some connections, could have gotten me into USC. That's about it. But I wanted to go to a liberal arts school, someplace where you didn't need a GPA and they really didn't care so much about your SAT scores, where they only cared about what you were interested in doing and exploring and how they could help you fulfill those needs. So it was the usual route a lot of kids go through: Hampshire, Sarah Lawrence...

But I knew right away that Bennington was the right place. It had a really strong writing program, as well as a strong music program—I wasn't sure if I was going to be a writing major or a music major. The campus was beautiful, and I liked the kids I met when I went there to look at the school. Bennington's motto was Learn by doing. You set up your own curriculum; they leave you alone. You have to have a lot of faith in your work, which is why I think Bennington has the highest attrition rate in the country; something like fifty percent of the freshman class leaves by the end of sophomore year. The kids who stay want to paint or become musicians or dancers or poets. They have a passion. It might not work out—it didn't work out for a lot of people —but the choice was not hard to make. I don't see any luck or fate in the decision. I looked around, I saw that place, and I wanted to go.

I definitely didn't plan to publish a novel at twenty-one. That was not in the cards. I thought the band I was in might go on tour after I graduated, but I hadn't thought about publishing a book. The luck-out was finally getting the nerve to give a certain professor there some of my writing samples, even though he was only teaching seniors and juniors, and I was a freshman. That took more guts than I normally had. From there, everything started playing itself out, and then a lot of luck and a lot of fate started to play a role in what happened to me.

Dave: What is Gary Fisketjon's most useful talent as an editor?

Ellis: Honesty. And, when it comes to the book itself, a bad bedside manner, which is really useful. A lot of editors are too afraid of the writer and let the writer get off track sometimes.

I published three books without Gary, and I've published three books now with him. Ultimately, I'm not one of those writers who'll turn in a manuscript and say, "The last hundred pages are a mess. Can you help me?" You'd be surprised; there are a lot of those out there.

I present what I think is the publishable manuscript. I want some grammar help and some line-editing here and there. If the book is fine, an editor's main job is to be a big supporter of the book in pushing it through all the different levels in a house and even beyond that, once it's on the street. Gary is very good at that. Very good. I hear horror stories from writers all the time who feel that their books were just tossed out there, and they had no one checking everything out, sending them emails, telling them about this or that. Gary loves his job. He's not going to go anywhere else. That's vital. But he's a tree editor; he's not a forest editor.

Dave: What's your favorite restaurant of the moment?

Ellis: I've got two. One is called Sona, and the other is a place called Lucques. Those are the two places I like best when I'm in L.A.

Dave: Reading American Psycho and to a lesser extent Glamorama, I couldn't help wondering how you know so much about fancy clothes.

Ellis: Research. I don't like clothes. I wrote two novels, one around the fashion industry and one around clothes whores, and it was all research. It was looking through GQ and seeing what the guys on Wall Street were wearing, since every other pictorial during those two years had guys hanging out in front of various office buildings downtown.

Also, what a lot of people don't realize, and what I had a lot of fun with, is that if you really saw the outfits Patrick Bateman describes, they'd look totally ridiculous. He would describe a certain kind of vest with a pair of pants and certain kind of shirt, and you think, He really must know so much, but if you actually saw people dressed like this, they would look like clowns. It was a subtle joke. If you read it on a surface level and know nothing about clothes, you read American Psycho and think, My God, we're in some sort of princely kingdom where everyone just walked out of GQ. No. They look like fools. They look like court jesters, most of them.

Bret Easton Ellis visited Powell's City of Books on September 7, 2005. Though well dressed, he was not wearing especially fancy clothes.