Things have gotten bad enough for Bret Easton Ellis over his contentious Kathryn Bigelow tweets that he’s decided to shift gears and offer a little contrition in a Daily Beast piece.

“I’ve taken a lot of hits in my career — they bounce off. The armor was built so long ago that I now assume everyone else in the public eye can handle it when they’re shot at. But the outcry over the Bigelow tweets was eye-opening to me in a way that nothing else has ever been. I got it. I heard it. I looked back at what I was doing with those tweets (quickly, unconsciously, hurriedly, drunkenly) and I have to admit they simply back-fired. Which is why I’m writing this. No one asked me to write this. I simply write something like this when I’m in pain. And I’ve been slowly feeling a painfulness when reading all of the articles reacting to those tweets.”

“The American press’s reaction to the Bigelow tweets was swift and overwhelming. Without reading the news I could still feel it swirling in the air because everyone around me was talking about it. It was by far the most sustained attack on anything I had tweeted about. What was odd about the collective anger was that the tweets were solely about daunting, glamorous Kathryn Bigelow — they were not directed at women everywhere, yet women united and seemed to bond over what they perceived as both a much broader and more personal “attack” (a word used often in the articles in the days that followed).

“No one likes being wrong — I mean really wrong — about something. And in some of the cases where I’ve been attacked I really haven’t cared, because I’m not an example. I don’t represent. I’m just a lone voice and not a teacher. And I refuse to make my Twitter page one; it is what it is, take it or leave it, follow or unfollow, enjoy it or let it piss you off. But I’m taking a bit of a break from Twitter — not fully, not all the time, just over the holidays — until I see Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie.

“And then, perhaps, we can start all over again.”