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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed

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.

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.

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

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.

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 aren't many shy writers left.

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

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