Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

With pencil, you can always erase.

… to rectify the errors that will creep in through lapse of time, or alteration of situation.

When you have made an error of historic proportions, the sooner you change policy, the smaller the price you will pay.

We do have our mistakes sometimes, like 'The New York Times' does, like everything does. We correct them.

Even the best intentions turn around one day... Nobody's right all the time.

When there's a pattern of mistakes, something has got to change.

I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

I'm excited and terrified to write something new.

Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error. . . .

Hee stands not surely, that never slips.

I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience.

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.

No one knows anything. You're going to make mistakes and you're going to do things that people think are stupid. You can't sit there and go, "I never want to make a mistake."

Beyond each corner, new directions lie in wait.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

We sought therefore to amend our will, and not to suffer it through despite to languish long time in error.

No matter how big the glam squad, or how dramatic the dress, sometimes things just don’t work out.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.

The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it. There's a phrase I use called "The Valley Full of Clouds." Writing a novel is as if you are going off on a journey across a valley. The valley is full of mist, but you can see the top of a tree here and the top of another tree over there. And with any luck you can see the other side of the valley. But you cannot see down into the mist. Nevertheless, you head for the first tree.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.