Jay McInerney
I'm a romantic; you have to be to marry four times.Collection: Romantic
We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.
Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.
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.
I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.
I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.
'Socialist' is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.
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.
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.
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 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.
You know, I'm always surprised when I read profiles, and they make me sound so jaded. I am so not jaded.
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.
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.
There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.
My former wife is a very eccentric woman, which is why I still love her.
Sometimes I think everything I touch turns into a Page Six item.
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.
Anybody who becomes a movie star becomes successful at projecting a certain image to the public.
There aren't many shy writers left.
I don't want to have my life fall apart for my work.
Mine is not an autonomous imagination.
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.
It's the cynics who never get married.
Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.
When you catch yourself lying to your therapist, you know it's a waste of money.
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.
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.
Yeah, 'Gossip Girl' is a good show. It's a real New York show, like 'Sex and the City.'
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 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.
Most of the people I write about have been ambitious outlanders who have been attracted to New York from other parts of the world.
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.
Add anchovies to almost anything, in moderation, and it will taste better.
I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.
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.
A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.
I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.Collection: Love
The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.Collection: Friendship
Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Wine
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Reading
Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayedCollection: 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.Collection: Vices
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.Collection: Odds