Writer Bret Easton Eliis: I Write From a Place of Feeling

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“People hate me. Or people love me.”

We met American writer Bret Easton Ellis for an open, personal, and honest conversation about reading, writing, and the quest to stay true to yourself.

”I am and have always been a very polarising figure in America. I am the worst-reviewed writer of my generation by the literary establishment press. They think I'm a stain on the literary world. I don't know why I'm so polarising.”

”There was so much controversy about American Psycho before it was published. The book was cancelled by my publishing house in 1990, and then subsequently by the 30 other publishers around the world who had published Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. All dumped me because of the contents of American Psycho. I was young enough and resilient enough to say, "Fuck you, I don't care," and I have to say that the only damage that the controversy did to me was that it made me distrust the world of adults. It was also the first inkling of corporate culture taking over the arts because the cancellation of American Psycho did not come from within the editorial house of the publisher. It came from the corporation that owned the publishing house. So it was a corporation that owned a publishing house that told the publishing house to cancel a novel for its content.”

”My parents had books. The house was filled with books. As young as I can remember, there were books everywhere. And my parents were big readers. They read everything. They read quality
literature, and they read pop literature. They had a copy of The Godfather in the house. It was the first time I saw the F-word, fuck, in a book. I was shocked. I must have been six or seven. And there was something very sexy about many of these books my parents had. And I also needed to escape from the darkness of the house I lived in, which, you know, it was painful at the time, but I can talk about it quite cheerily now, to a degree. A lot of pain in the house, alcoholism, and divorce were happening. My father was a very, very angry man. And so, I disappeared into books. I loved books. I fell in love with books at a very early age. I read everything.”

”I write from a place of feeling. I am not a career writer. I write as a hobby. I enjoy writing. It's bliss, it's happiness. Well, what fascinated me about writing, unlike other writers who think it's so fun because you can create anyone you want and create any world you want, that's a given. That has nothing to do with my creative process or even if I have a process. For me, it's simply enjoyable. It's not an intellectual process. Writing for me is an emotional process. I'm feeling something, therefore I want to write about this feeling. I don't have things I want to say, I don't have political things I want to talk about. I'm not writing because I can control a character or I can create a world; I'm actually writing about a feeling. I'm writing about something that's going on in my life that is obsessing me, that's bothering me, that's hurting me, that's confusing me, that's distracting me. And then a book comes out of that, and that's how it's always been.”

Bret Easton Ellis was born in 1964 in Los Angeles, California. He is a best-selling American novelist, screenwriter, short story writer, and social commentator whose writings portray, in his words, “the most pessimistic and ironic generation that has ever roamed the earth.”

He debuted with the 1985 bestseller Less Than Zero, a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers in Los Angeles while still an undergraduate student at Bennington College. Since then, he has published six more novels, including The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho (dubbed by Rolling Stone “the most controversial novel of the Nineties”), Glamorama, Lunar Park, Imperial Bedrooms and The Shards, as well as a collection of stories, The Informers. In 2020, he published his first work of nonfiction, White, a defence for the freedom of speech in the social-media age.

Ellis’ works have been translated into almost 30 languages. Four of his books—Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and The Informers have all been made into films. American Psycho has also been transformed into a Broadway musical.

Bret Easton Ellis was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in June 2023. The conversation took place at Ellis’ Danish Publisher, Lindhardt & Ringhof, in central Copenhagen.

Camera: Jakob Solbakken
Edited by: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025

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