Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Jay McInerney
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Jay McInerney.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
There aren't many shy writers left.
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.
There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.
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 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.
I'm a romantic; you have to be to marry four times.
Mine is not an autonomous imagination.
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.
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 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.
It's the cynics who never get married.
Sometimes I think everything I touch turns into a Page Six item.
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.
Yeah, 'Gossip Girl' is a good show. It's a real New York show, like 'Sex and the City.'
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.
We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.
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.
Most of the people I write about have been ambitious outlanders who have been attracted to New York from other parts of the world.
You know, I'm always surprised when I read profiles, and they make me sound so jaded. I am so not jaded.
Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.
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.
When you catch yourself lying to your therapist, you know it's a waste of money.
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 like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.
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.
I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
My former wife is a very eccentric woman, which is why I still love her.
The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.
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 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.
'Socialist' is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.
Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.
A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.
I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.
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.
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.
"Socialist" is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.
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.
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 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."
Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed
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.
Your heartbreak is just another version of the same old story.
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.
Great minds sink alike, right?
I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.
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.
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.
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 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.
The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.
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.
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.
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.
The only sensible approach is not to take it too seriously. What counts is the writing.
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 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.
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