Top 60 Jay McInerney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families.”

— Jay McInerney

2. “Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we’re afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.”

— Jay McInerney

3. “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

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

— Jay McInerney

5. “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

6. “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

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

— Jay McInerney

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

— Jay McInerney

9. “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

10. “Everything becomes symbol and irony when you’ve been betrayed.”

— Jay McInerney

11. “Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.”

— Jay McInerney

12. “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

13. “Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.”

— Jay McInerney

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

— Jay McInerney

15. “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

16. “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

17. “You are the kind of guy who always hopes for a miracle at the last minute.”

— Jay McInerney

18. “There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.”

— Jay McInerney

19. “Here you are again. All messed up and no place to go.”

— Jay McInerney

20. “Delia’s arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing.”

— Jay McInerney

21. “You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy.”

— Jay McInerney

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

— Jay McInerney

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

— Jay McInerney

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

— Jay McInerney

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Jay McInerney

28. “I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.”

— Jay McInerney

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

— Jay McInerney

30. “The sound of the tumblers in the locks of your apartment door puts you in mind of dungeons. The place is haunted. Just this morning you found a makeup brush beside the toilet. Memories lurk like dustballs at the backs of drawers. The stereo is a special model that plays only music fraught with poignant associations.”

— Jay McInerney

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

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

— Jay McInerney

37. “She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view – the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can’t imagine what it’s like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you.”

— Jay McInerney

38. “I don’t want to have my life fall apart for my work.”

— Jay McInerney

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “It’s the cynics who never get married.”

— Jay McInerney

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “Growing up meant admitting you couldn’t have everything.”

— Jay McInerney

48. “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

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

— Jay McInerney

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

— Jay McInerney