Jay McInerney Quotations

I feel that there's a lot of would-be guardians of the culture who think that high-minded literary purpose and the life that gets chronicled in the gossip columns, that these two things are incompatible.

I always hope people will like me, and I'm always afraid they will think I'm a fraud. I try harder than perhaps I should to make people like me, then it backfires. They think I'm a buffoon.

I think a lot of the people who write about me think that if they had to write fewer interviews then they would transcribe their life-story and it would be a big success. Or should be.

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.

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

You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York.

The definition of gumbo is almost as slippery as that of Creole. Just as gumbo can contain pretty much any kind of meat or seafood, Creole is a vague and inclusive term for native New Orleanians, who may be black or white, depending on whom you're asking.

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.

I don't think I found my voice until I reached New York. I suppose it's possible I would have had some kind of different literary career if I had not discovered New York.

I certainly think that the publishing houses have to learn more about this informal network of literary blogging and get over the idea that sending an author on a book tour - to Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles - is a successful model anymore.

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

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

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

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

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.

I'm afraid that - not necessarily deliberately, but consistently - I've made a kind of laboratory out of my life, where I mix the stuff in the test tubes to create explosions - possibly resulting in interesting by-products. I mean, not deliberately - I'd be crazy to deliberately do that - or maybe not.

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

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

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

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

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.

There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.

Your presence here is is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren’t.

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.

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

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.

Great minds sink alike, right?

'Socialist' is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.

I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.

I remain a fan of my friend Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho.' I think as a book about New York in the '80s it was pretty excellent.

I'm a romantic; you have to be to marry four times.

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

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.

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.

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

It's the cynics who never get married.

I realized that I might not ever make it as a writer, that it might be because I wasn't good enough, or that it might be because the odds were just too long.

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.

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

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.

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

Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.

Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed

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

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

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

There aren't many shy writers left.

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

A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Things happen, people change,' is what Amanda said. For her that covered it. You wanted an explanation, and ending that would assign blame and dish up justice. You considered violence and you considered reconciliation . But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.

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

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

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.

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 think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.