Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

I never really had any close friends in India, and I felt a terrible loneliness and isolation for many years. Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.

The thing is, I really can't relate to anyone my own age. Not in a superior way - an inferior way, if anything. Socially, I have no idea what my friends are talking about. I don't listen to any new music. I feel very secluded.

I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.

I don't belong in the world. That's what it is. Something separates me from other people.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

I've never really fit in.

A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.

If I felt like a fish out of water in my family, I felt like a fish on Mars in Adam’s circle.

One day you're racing about the business of life, harried but vital, a part of its machinery. Then gradually but inexorably you are left out, until one day you find the machinery tearing along without you - and nobody even notices.

I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider.

I know nothing. I know no one. I’m lonely. Every time I see you, you’ve put up some new wall, and you never let me in.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?

Loneliness in a crowd of people was the worst kind of loneliness, but she couldn't help it.

I always felt like an outcast at school. I had good friends, but none that I truly related to.

I drink every night. But I don't hang out and party. Not that I'm selling out Madison Square Garden, but in the old days after a show you could hang out with a few people. But now you're hanging around with 20 people, all of whom don't know each other, and they're all, "Leave my outgoing greeting on my voice mail, man, come on!"

Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.

I never understood alienation. Alienation from what? You have to want to be part of something in order to feel alienated from it.

I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.

I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.

Then everyone leaves, and you are left, each night, to your own devices with a crowd of interesting people - most of whom you don't know - sitting in the dark.

Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

Loneliness is the leprosy of the modern world.

So, this is how it's become? This is how I've become? A walking contradiction? I'm surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it's like I don't know what to do with it, I don't know how to be a normal person anymore.