Top 40 Jonathan Ames Quotes

I’ve always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That’s how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.

I need to stay in the present and use that new-age mantra: ‘I’m okay right now.’ But I worry about all the things I’m failing at every moment.

I promote my own self-hatred.

To write about a place, you have to live there.

I wish I was the kind of writer who would go to a war zone and write about something that’s meaningful and important to people, but that’s not my area of coverage.

I am always the source of the worst rumors about myself.

I don’t laugh that much, but I do like humorous books, and I like to entertain readers that way.

I grew up in northern New Jersey – the banlieue of New York – and I now live in Brooklyn. I am separated from my parents by about 50 miles, but really there is almost no distance between us. I speak to them nearly every day.

When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.

Having a show get canceled is like, ‘Oh, you have caviar between your teeth,’ you know what I mean? Because you had a show in the first place.

As a child, I wanted to be an athlete, a professional tennis player or something like that.

I have very few hobbies. In fact, I have no hobbies.

I don’t have ADD, but I only like to pay attention to the things I like to pay attention to, and things like getting a TV and getting the cable working are beyond me, and so I let such things lapse, sometimes for years. This applies to keeping my apartment clean.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.

I don’t mind being ridiculed – well, I guess I would mind a little, but it would only last a few minutes – it’s all very ephemeral; it doesn’t really matter what people think of me.

I don’t like to publicly acknowledge being a Jew.

It’s hard to leave New York: this is where my friends are, my parents are. It is so vital. The whole world seems to look to New York.

I’ve really never written about my relationships, or things like that. I wouldn’t want to divulge things that were too private.

I didn’t play or like a lot of board games as a child. I liked playing with my G.I. Joes and making up adventures for them.

I’m actually much more shy and self-conscious than people’s perception of me.

I don’t know that I’ve gotten much feedback directly from the literary world; sometimes I doubt even the notion that there is a literary world, though I guess there is or was.

A lot of writers, probably because they’re sensitive, which makes them want to be writers, have fears about their masculinity, so they overcompensate by having an interest in boxing and tough-guy things.

Something has happened where you almost never grow up in America. Maybe it’s the greater wealth.

I might have some sort of personality disorder. I might not have proper filters; it might be some kind of version of Asperger’s meets Tourettes meets prose.

I’ve always been inspired by Don Quixote as a role model of sorts, of the power of books to sort of make you insane in maybe a beautiful way.

Now, all writing – all the arts – are a form of ‘Pay attention to me,’ but there’s also the flip side. Like, I want to give something. Let me entertain you, let me amuse you, let me try to please you with this thing I’ve made. And then pay attention to me.

There’s no shortage of material in life.

No, I’m not very productive at all. I’m probably like an animal. I mean, great animals in the ocean feed all the time. I’m someone who procrastinates, worries, for most of a month, and then I’ll have a flurry of manic productivity with a sense of great urgency and fear for, like, two days.

I drink coffee. Without coffee, I probably couldn’t write.

The reason it’s hard for me to tweet is I don’t want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.

For me, the past is dead. Can’t go back.

There are so many talented young writers named Jonathan, with whom by comparison I suffer terribly.

Twitter is so severe, you know? And it’s completely for free, it’s scattershot, and it’s very easy to feel embarrassed. It’s hard to be artful with it. It’s like a ticker tape. It’s not a forum that’s worth mastering, you know?

I don’t like rides. I take everything in life quite literally, and so I genuinely feel terrified on rides and liable to vomit at any moment, and I hate to vomit even more than I fear rides.

Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.

I don’t really recognise success. I don’t see myself as on an upwardly mobile trajectory. I see myself as on the edge of a cliff about to fall off.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing – putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

It’s hard for me to think of writing a novel, because it takes so long.

Mostly I have to try to censor myself so as not to write things that will hurt other people, or that will go too far.

I’m a somewhat isolated person in my own way, or I move along a little trail, I go this place, I go that place. It’s not like I’m varying my exposure.