Jay McInerney Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.

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

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'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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.

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.

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

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

It's the cynics who never get married.

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.

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.

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

Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.

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

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

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

Great minds sink alike, right?

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

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.

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

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

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

There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.

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.