Jay McInerney famous quotes

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

#Sex #Sleep #Men

The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.
-- Jay McInerney

#Friendship #Family #Inspiring

I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.
-- Jay McInerney

#World #Facts #University

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

#Self #Soul #Want

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.
-- Jay McInerney

#Life #Book #Names

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

#Stories

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.
-- Jay McInerney

#Fear #Thinking #Eyelashes

I don't want to have my life fall apart for my work.
-- Jay McInerney

#Fall #Want #Falling Apart

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

#Mean #Thinking #Numbers

Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.
-- Jay McInerney

#Drink #Motto #My Motto

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

#Stars #Successful #Certain

I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.
-- Jay McInerney

#Imagine

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

#Writing #Discovery #Envy

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

#New York #Book #Thinking

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

#Vices #Lucky #Pleasure

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

#Sound #Profile

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.
-- Jay McInerney

#Ideas #People #Worry

Yeah, 'Gossip Girl' is a good show. It's a real New York show, like 'Sex and the City.
-- Jay McInerney

#Girl #Sex #New York

When you catch yourself lying to your therapist, you know it's a waste of money.
-- Jay McInerney

#Lying #Waste #Therapists

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.
-- Jay McInerney

#Hearing #Novel

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

#Luck #Generations #Fleeting

I'm a romantic; you have to be to marry four times.
-- Jay McInerney

#Four

Add anchovies to almost anything, in moderation, and it will taste better.
-- Jay McInerney

#Add #Taste #Moderation

There aren't many shy writers left.
-- Jay McInerney

#Shy

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

#Teacher #Writing #Two

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.
-- Jay McInerney

#Crazy #Mean #Interesting

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

#Sleep #Wine #Night

Great minds sink alike, right?
-- Jay McInerney

#Mind #Great Minds

Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed
-- Jay McInerney

#Betrayed #Irony #Symbols

Taste ... is a matter of taste (Tad Allagash)
-- Jay McInerney

#Matter #Taste

'Socialist' is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.
-- Jay McInerney

#Politician #Quarters #Socialist

Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.
-- Jay McInerney

#Lines #Changed

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing
-- Jay McInerney

#Suicide #Self Harm #Arms

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

#Hard Work #Secret #Quiet

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

#Thinking #Grieving #Practice

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

#Matter #Limits #Conducting

There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.
-- Jay McInerney

#Failing #Nobility

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

#Flower #Water #Too Much

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

#Fashion #America #Achievement

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

#Hero #Rocks #Wish

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

#Life #Horse #House

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

#Self #Novelists #World

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

#Attention #World #Factory Workers

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

#Country #Type #Very Deep

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.
-- Jay McInerney

#Book #Interesting #Surprise

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

#Thinking #Pages #Six

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

#New York #Writing #People

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.
-- Jay McInerney

#Imagination

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

#Love Is #Quests #Want

It's the cynics who never get married.
-- Jay McInerney

#Married

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

#Wife #Eccentric #Former