Top 88 Jay McInerney Quotes
#1. Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.
Jay McInerney
#2. 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.
Jay McInerney
#3. When you catch yourself lying to your therapist, you know it's a waste of money.
Jay McInerney
#6. Your heartbreak is just another version of the same old story.
Jay McInerney
#8. He insisted on a single trade secret: that you had to survive, find some quiet, and work hard every day.
Jay McInerney
#10. 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.
Jay McInerney
#11. 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.
Jay McInerney
#12. Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed
Jay McInerney
#13. 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.
Jay McInerney
#14. 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.
Jay McInerney
#15. Tad's mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren't is more fun than where you are.
Jay McInerney
#16. The intercom buzzes while you're changing your shirt. You push the Talk button: "Who is it?" "Narcotics squad. We're soliciting donations for children all over the world who have no drugs.
Jay McInerney
#17. 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.
Jay McInerney
#18. 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.
Jay McInerney
#19. I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.
Jay McInerney
#20. 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.
Jay McInerney
#21. You have a bad memory for details. You can tell her the date of the Spanish Armada, but you couldn't even guess at the balance of your checkbook.
Jay McInerney
#22. Sometimes I think everything I touch turns into a Page Six item.
Jay McInerney
#24. Here you are again. All messed up and no place to go.
Jay McInerney
#25. I don't want to have my life fall apart for my work.
Jay McInerney
#26. Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing
Jay McInerney
#27. 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.
Jay McInerney
#28. A pockmarked boy with a scraggy ponytail and four tiny rings in his right ear leaned against the wall of the armory, holding his dog on a leash, a sign hanging from his neck: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO PET MY DOG. IT MAY MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER.
Jay McInerney
#29. I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
Jay McInerney
#30. The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.
Jay McInerney
#31. You know, I'm always surprised when I read profiles, and they make me sound so jaded. I am so not jaded.
Jay McInerney
#32. 'Socialist' is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.
Jay McInerney
#33. You keep meaning to cultivate an expertise in spectator sport. More and more you realize that sports trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country.
Jay McInerney
#34. A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.
Jay McInerney
#35. 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.
Jay McInerney
#36. 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.
Jay McInerney
#37. Did you know that ninety percent of your average household dust is composed of human epidermal matter? That's skin, to you.
Perhaps this explains your sense of Amanda's omnipresence. She has left her skin behind.
Jay McInerney
#38. There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.
Jay McInerney
#39. Yeah, 'Gossip Girl' is a good show. It's a real New York show, like 'Sex and the City.'
Jay McInerney
#40. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. The need the Bolivian Marching Powder.
Jay McInerney
#41. 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.
Jay McInerney
#42. Memories lurk like dustballs in the backs of drawers. The stereo is a special model that plays only music fraught with poignant associations.
Jay McInerney
#43. 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.
Jay McInerney
#44. I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.
Jay McInerney
#45. You are the kind of guy who always hopes for a miracle at the last minute.
Jay McInerney
#46. It's the Abstract Expressionist approach to publishing. Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge.
Jay McInerney
#47. 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.
Jay McInerney
#48. Eventually you ascend the stairs to the street. You think of Plato's pilgrims climbing out of the cave, from the shadow world of appearances toward things as they really are, and you wonder if it is possible to change in this life. Being with a philosopher makes you think.
Jay McInerney
#49. When the train begins to move they return to their Posts and their private sorrows.
Jay McInerney
#50. Love is recreational, it needs not be aspirational
Jay McInerney
#51. Tears come to your eyes, and you feel such a rush of tenderness and pity that you stop beside a lamppost and hang on for support.
Jay McInerney
#52. You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy.
Jay McInerney
#53. Add anchovies to almost anything, in moderation, and it will taste better.
Jay McInerney
#54. 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.
Jay McInerney
#55. Your presence here is is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't.
Jay McInerney
#56. There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.
Jay McInerney
#57. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours
Jay McInerney
#58. 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.
Jay McInerney
#59. The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp. It looks like a long, sutured gash. You tell her it is very realistic. She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. You meant as opposed to romantic. "I could use one of those right over my heart," you say.
Jay McInerney
#60. You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity.
Jay McInerney
#61. It's like, you can't trust anybody, and if somebody you know doesn't fuck you over it's just because the price of selling you down the river was never high enough.
Jay McInerney
#62. 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.
Jay McInerney
#63. Sometimes you feel like the only man in the city without group affiliation.
Jay McInerney
#64. 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.
Jay McInerney
#65. You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to what seems merely a chain reaction of pointless disasters.
Jay McInerney
#66. Anybody who becomes a movie star becomes successful at projecting a certain image to the public.
Jay McInerney
#68. The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.
Jay McInerney
#69. 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.
Jay McInerney
#70. I'm a romantic; you have to be to marry four times.
Jay McInerney
#71. He belonged to the new breed of male epicureans who viewed cooking as a competitive sport, and pursued it with the same avidity that others had for fly-fishing or golf, with the attendant fetishization of the associated gadgetry and equipment. He
Jay McInerney
#72. We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.
Jay McInerney
#73. The level of the room keeps changing. All of the surfaces swell and recede with oceanic rhytm. You are not quite all right. You are somewhat wrong.
Jay McInerney
#74. My former wife is a very eccentric woman, which is why I still love her.
Jay McInerney
#76. Under the spell of alcohol your differences recede.
Jay McInerney
#77. The only sensible approach is not to take it too seriously. What counts is the writing.
Jay McInerney
#79. I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.
Jay McInerney
#80. The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.
Jay McInerney
#81. they'd followed their best instincts and based their lives on the premise that money couldn't buy happiness, learning only gradually the many varieties of unhappiness it might have staved off. Russell
Jay McInerney
#82. Most of the people I write about have been ambitious outlanders who have been attracted to New York from other parts of the world.
Jay McInerney
#83. 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.
Jay McInerney
#84. Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.
Jay McInerney
#85. Suffering is supposed to be the raw stuff of art.
Jay McInerney
#86. Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.
Jay McInerney
#87. 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.
Jay McInerney
#88. 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.
Jay McInerney
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