Jay McInerney quotes:

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.

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'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

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

Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.

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

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.

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

I'd urge you to try German Riesling because it's delicious, but I fear you'll be more impressed if I tell you it's cutting-edge. That, after all, is what we want to know-- what's now and happening. (Do you really think clunky square-toed shoes make your feet look better than those with slimming, tapered toes? You just wear them because that's what fashion dictates, you slut.)"

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 think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.

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 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.

You know, I'm always surprised when I read profiles, and they make me sound so jaded. I am so not jaded.

It's the cynics who never get married.

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

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'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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

There aren't many shy writers left.

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

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

The only sensible approach is not to take it too seriously. What counts is the writing.

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

Taste ... is a matter of taste (Tad Allagash)

Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed

Great minds sink alike, right?

Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.

There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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