Jay McInerney
Jay McInerney
John Barrett "Jay" McInerney, Jr.is an American novelist. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia, which starred Angelina Jolie. He was the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, and his essays on wine have been...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 January 1955
CityHartford, CT
CountryUnited States of America
Great minds sink alike, right?
'Socialist' is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.
I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.
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.
I'm a romantic; you have to be to marry four times.
There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.
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.
Mine is not an autonomous imagination.
Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.
It's the cynics who never get married.
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.
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.
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.