Top 30 Jay McInerney Quotes

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.

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 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 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 want to have my life fall apart for my work.

Anybody who becomes a movie star becomes successful at projecting a certain image to the public.

I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.

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.

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

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.

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.

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

Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

It’s the cynics who never get married.

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

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.

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.

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

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they’re going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

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

Yeah, ‘Gossip Girl’ is a good show. It’s a real New York show, like ‘Sex and the City.’

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

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

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