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Book: White
Quotes of Book: White

Bret Easton Ellis _ White
Certainly, in the spring of 2013 I hadn't fucked up as many gay lives as Bill Clinton had.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
We seem to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing their true selves. In other words: the actor's dream.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
It moved me away from the narcissism of childhood and into the world's mysteries-the unexplained, the taboo, the other-and drew me closer to a place of understanding and acceptance.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
This forced you to look again at the people who raised them, coddling them with praise and trying to shield them from the grim sides of life, which might well have created children who, as adults, appeared highly confident, competent and positive but at the hint of darkness or negativity often became paralyzed and unable to react except with disbelief and tears-You just victimized me!-and retreated, in effect, into their childhood bubbles."
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
But most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined even a decade ago, and thanks to this burgeoning cult of likability, in a sense, we've all become actors. We've had to rethink the means with which to express our feelings and thoughts and ideas and opinions in the void created by a corporate culture that is forever trying to silence us by sucking up everything human and contradictory and real with its assigned rule book on how to behave.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
The litany of what I did want? To be challenged. To not live in the safety of my own little snow globe and be reassured by familiarity and surrounded by what made me comfortable and coddled me. To stand in other people's shoes and see how they saw the world-especially if they were outsiders and monsters and freaks who would lead me as far away as possible from whatever my comfort zone supposedly was-because I sensed I was that outsider, that monster, that freak. I craved being shaken. I loved ambiguity. I wanted to change my mind, about one thing and another, virtually anything. I wanted to get upset and even be damaged by art. I wanted to get wiped out by the cruelty of someone's vision of the world, whether it was Shakespeare or Scorsese, Joan Didion or Dennis Cooper. And all of this had a profound effect. It gave me empathy. It helped me realize that another world existed beyond my own, with other viewpoints and backgrounds and proclivities, and I have no doubt that this aided me in becoming an adult. It moved me away from the narcissism of childhood and into the world's mysteries-the unexplained, the taboo, the other-and drew me closer to a place of understanding and acceptance.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
Here's the dead end of social media: after you've created your own bubble that reflects only what you relate to or what you identify with, after you've blocked and unfollowed people whose opinions and worldview you judge and disagree with, after you've created your own little utopia based on your cherished values, then a kind of demented narcissism begins to warp this pretty picture. Not being able or willing to put yourself in someone else's shoes-to view life differently from how you yourself experience it-is the first step toward being not empathic, and this is why so many progressive movements become as rigid and as authoritarian as the institutions they're resisting.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
If I often wished the world were a different place, I also knew-and horror movies helped reinforce this-that it never would be, a realization that in turn led me to a mode of acceptance.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
Everything has been degraded by what the sensory overload and the supposed freedom-of-choice technology has brought to us, and, in short, by the democratization of the arts.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
Sheen's supposed propensity for violence against women hadn't hurt his popularity with female fans either, and if anyone wants to know what that means, then that's a story for maybe fifty other books.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
The horror of 9/11 represented the end of Empire, a shock that moved us out of the twentieth century's binary Cold War thinking {The center will not hold} and into a world where there was, and is, no center; our enemies are insurgent and decentralized, our media also decentralized and insurgent.
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Bret Easton Ellis _ White
As the film historian and critic David Thomson has asked: "What are movies without male lust?
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