Jay McInerney

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.