Biography

Received numerous death threats and hate mail after the publication of his graphically violent novel American Psycho. Today, the novel is considered by many his best work yet.

Was 21 when his first novel was published (Less Than Zero, 1985) while Bret was still a student at Bennington College).

Has cross-referenced characters in his books. For example, Blair and Julian from "Less Than Zero" are mentioned in "The Informers", Sean Bateman from "The Rules of Attraction" is the younger brother of Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho".

His influences include: Hemingway, Joan Didion, Joyce, Flaubert, and Dennis Cooper; plus books, movies, TV and rock and roll.

In his novel "American Psycho", he borrowed a character from Tana Janowitz's short story collection "Slaves of New York" (Stash) and a character from Jay McInerney's book "Story of My Life" (Alison Poole). In a recent interview he said that the inclusion of Alison Poole was because he was upset at McInerney over something (he couldn't recall) and his revenge was to have her attacked by Patrick Bateman. She then appeared in his novel "Glamorama."

(Movies are) much more powerful sensory experiences than novels. A novel is a different kind of transport, I guess, and it's very easy to let a movie envelop you. It's difficult for a novel to have that same power, because one is a passive experience and one is an active experience. You're working with the novel as you read it, creating your own virtual reality. You're picturing what everyone looks like, what everyone's wearing, what the scene looks like in your mind, and the movie's doing all that for you. It's the rare book that's able to transport you in a way that a movie does. Even a not-so-good movie can kind of give you some thrills or a rush. I mean, we all see so many more movies than we do read novels. It's not a problem, it's just how it is.

(on the negative reception of Less Than Zero (1987)) "Well, who was happy with it? I don't know anyone who was happy with it. The director wasn't happy with it, and it was this compromised movie for many, many reasons. I don't think it began that way - I think that Scott Rudin and Barry Diller, who were the ones who brought it to 20th Century Fox, had a very different movie in mind. I think when there was the regime change at the studio with Leonard Goldberg taking over, who was a family man who had kids, it became a different beast. I grew up around Hollywood, and I had no real desire to see the book made into a movie. I thought, 'Well, we'll take the money, and 98% of all books optioned never make it to the screen, so...'"

(why The Rules of Attraction (2002) was not set in the 1980's) "I think there were some sort of commercial problems with that. The studio thought its main audience was college kids today - which it wasn't, because no one went to see the movie. I think there was a compromise, because the movie doesn't announce so strongly that it's taking place now. It's in this hazy middle period of 80's music and 80's references, and yet there are cell phones and computers. But that's just wallpaper. I think the movie itself is the one movie that captured my sensibility in a visual and cinematic language."

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies. If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically. That's why I think, personally, that they're very tricky to adapt - that, and the fact that my narrators are semi-secretive and unreliable at times.

(on what went wrong with The Informers (2008)) "You need someone who understood that milieu. You need a Breck Eisner, you need someone who grew up around here. You also need someone with an Altman-esque sense of humor, because the script is really funny. The movie is not funny at all, and there are scenes in the movie that should be funny that we wrote as funny, and they're played as we wrote them, but they're directed in a way that they're not funny. It was very distressing to see the cuts of this movie and realize that all the laughs were gone."