Jay McInerney Quotes

There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.

Taste ... is a matter of taste (Tad Allagash)

I think, when I'm writing, I have a more clinical view than I do when I'm reading. I like pretending to be God and basically determining the fate of my characters. But as a reader, I'm a sucker. I'm very sentimental. I get upset when people that I like die. And yet I have killed off characters in my books quite heartlessly, and sometimes found that readers were very upset by it.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.

When you catch yourself lying to your therapist, you know it's a waste of money.

Your heartbreak is just another version of the same old story.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

The only thing worse for smoking than drinking is quitting drinking. Because then it's the only thing you can do.

Sometimes I think everything I touch turns into a Page Six item.

I was fortunate to get a lot of mileage out of my vices . . . The point is not to be debilitated by your pleasures. Maybe I have lucky genes or something but I've never been truly addicted to anything, except pleasure in general.

My former wife is a very eccentric woman, which is why I still love her.

Anybody who becomes a movie star becomes successful at projecting a certain image to the public.

Bottles of wine aren't like paintings. At some point you have to consume them. The object in life is to die with no bottles of wine in your cellar. To drink your last bottle of wine and go to sleep that night and not wake up.

Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.

The only sensible approach is not to take it too seriously. What counts is the writing.

You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure.

If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

It's the cynics who never get married.

Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.

I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.

Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume.

Most of the people I write about have been ambitious outlanders who have been attracted to New York from other parts of the world.

Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.

A modest critique of an age in which an actor is the President, in which fashion models are asked for their opinions, in which getting into a nightclub is seen as a significant human achievement.

There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.

Most all of the writers I admired when I was in my teens and twenties died young. Fitzgerald lived the longest. He was 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. And then once you're approaching 40, you suddenly think, "Well, maybe I would like to live longer than Fitzgerald or Thomas."

I don't think I've left a trail of weeping women in my wake. I mean, the number of serious relationships I've had has not been into double digits.

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.

If being a spokesman for a generation is a fleeting occupation, being a symbol of an era is downright dangerous for anyone who has the bad luck to outlive it.

Yeah, 'Gossip Girl' is a good show. It's a real New York show, like 'Sex and the City.

Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.

There aren't many shy writers left.

Add anchovies to almost anything, in moderation, and it will taste better.

Great minds sink alike, right?

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.

I don't want to have my life fall apart for my work.

I think it's dangerous to think you know what you're writing. I usually don't know, and usually I just discover it in the course of writing. I envy those writers who can outline a beginning, a middle, and end. Fitzgerald supposedly did it. John Irving does. Bret Easton Ellis does. But for me, the writing itself is the process of discovery. I can't see all that far ahead.

You know, Im always surprised when I read profiles, and they make me sound so jaded. I am so not jaded.

He insisted on a single trade secret: that you had to survive, find some quiet, and work hard every day.

The 20th century saw far greater catastrophes than September 11th, as bad as it was, and they didn't render literature or art or music irrelevant. In fact, I think that literature and art help us to understand - sometimes they provide narratives and metaphors for understanding history, for understanding recent catastrophes.

What I'm nostalgic for is the idea of an edge in New York. There used to be these fringes of the city where civilization sort of ended, and therefore young people could live cheaply, or open nightclubs or art galleries, or even squat. That fringe moved out to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The whole idea of the metropolis is the centralization of like-minded souls, and when the central real estate becomes too expensive, the dreamers, the young poets, and the artists will go elsewhere.

I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.

Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.