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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

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Jay McInerney
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 13
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Hartford
Connecticut
Find
Outline
Writing
Outlines
Going
Novels
Envy
Discovery
Writers
Novel
Process

More quotes by Jay McInerney

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I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.
Jay McInerney
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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.
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I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.
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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.
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Mine is not an autonomous imagination.
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I don't want to have my life fall apart for my work.
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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
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When you catch yourself lying to your therapist, you know it's a waste of money.
Jay McInerney
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Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.
Jay McInerney
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Most all of the writers I admired when I was in my teens and twenties died young. Fitzgerald lived the longest. He was 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. And then once you're approaching 40, you suddenly think, Well, maybe I would like to live longer than Fitzgerald or Thomas.
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Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing
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I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.
Jay McInerney
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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
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It's the cynics who never get married.
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The only thing worse for smoking than drinking is quitting drinking. Because then it's the only thing you can do.
Jay McInerney
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Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.
Jay McInerney
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Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.
Jay McInerney
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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
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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
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He insisted on a single trade secret: that you had to survive, find some quiet, and work hard every day.
Jay McInerney