Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.

The better you look, the more you see.

There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.

But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.

My pain is constant and sharp...this confession has meant nothing

I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."

I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.