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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
Novel
Process
Find
Outline
Writing
Outlines
Going
Novels
Envy
Discovery
Writers

More quotes by Jay McInerney

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You know, Im always surprised when I read profiles, and they make me sound so jaded. I am so not jaded.
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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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It's the cynics who never get married.
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Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed
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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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Taste ... is a matter of taste (Tad Allagash)
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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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There aren't many shy writers left.
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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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There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.
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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.
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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.
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Socialist is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.
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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.
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I'm a romantic you have to be to marry four times.
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A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.
Jay McInerney
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Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.
Jay McInerney
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Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.
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Mine is not an autonomous imagination.
Jay McInerney
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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.
Jay McInerney