‘Crazy’ has been a word commonly associated with Kanye West. He’s been on the record about struggling with Bipolar Type-1, as well as mental trauma from his 2002 car crash.
“Bipolar disorder comes with its own defense system. Denial. When you’re manic, you don’t think you’re sick. You think everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you’re seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you’re losing your grip entirely,” Ye wrote in the Wall Street Journal in January 2026.
This feeling of ostracization led him to deeply relate to the 2000 film American Psycho. In a 2008 interview with The Fader, Kanye West talked about the Christian Bale led film being a key point of reference while making 808s & Heartbreak. Ultimately, he felt really seen after years of being called crazy. Eventually, he found power in it.
Kanye West on Relating to ‘American Psycho’ (But Not Reading The Book)
“When I see that movie, I just feel like it was me. I feel like… I have been crazy, I have dealt with people who are crazy towards me,” West explained. He added, “I think that love can make you crazy, and you just embrace it. Crazy is the label the normal put on the exceptional, ’cause crazy is like, it’s all how you feel about something. It’s like feelings are the only facts, I learned that from girls.”
The interviewer immediately noted that Ye didn’t quite pick up on the primary themes. Everything about the emptiness of consumption and how it rewires the values and mindsets of men. But once there was mention of the book, he immediately shrugged that he doesn’t read.
“I’ve never read anything other than like a magazine. Like the first two chapters maybe, scanned the rest, and I was like, I’m tired of looking up words,” Kanye West admitted. “I wanna look up real people, talk to real people, have conversations. I wanna look at like TV, it’s more exciting than books. TV is blatantly more exciting than books. But you know I do read to stay up in a movie: What I’ll do is I’ll watch a movie and I’ll text, and that’s reading.”
Kanye was a big fan of how Christian Bale’s character ‘liked porn’
Watching the movie though, Ye saw how Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman character presented himself and immediately gravitated towards it. “Isn’t that 100 percent Kanye West s**t, like my whole s**t? Every time someone walks in, I’ll peep the whole fit, I’ll see if there’s something I can gain from it.”
“I’m like, ‘Man, I need to add that to my repertoire.’ He’s like looking at the business card, and he’s like, ‘Girl what kinda bag is that? Jean Paul Gaultier?’ It’s like one of my favorite scenes,” West recalled.
“And I loved his explanations. We’re actually gonna do some mixtape s**t with the explanations—it’ll just be on my album. And I like how he liked porn and stuff like that, except he took it too far.”
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