Jay McInerney Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 love to imagine inside the head of a woman.

Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.

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.

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

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

Great minds sink alike, right?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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