Jonathan Ames Quotes

Some ego is involved because I guess one wants to be perceived as a good clown and one puts one's name on the art; but it's so hard to do anything in life, trapped as we are in our bodies, that is purely selfless for others ... somehow the self is always involved.

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.

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 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.

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.

It was one of those days when every time I went to go out the door, something grabbed me in the back of the brain and said, lie down and masturbate one more time.

I wondered where the person was who had taken my place, who wanted to know what news people had been told. I'm always looking for the person who replaces me, who thinks the things I do, who fills in for me when I'm not there. I know there is someone younger than me doing what I did and someone older doing what I will do, and someone my age being just like me.

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.

People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.

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

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

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.

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.

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

It's kind of like wearing a baseball cup. I want to call it the Mangina." "That's a good name for it ... Where are the other vaginas you made?" Chandler brought over to me a plastic bag and dumped out all the failed vaginas on to his drafting table.

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.

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.

How terrible to be alcoholic. You just want to quietly soothe and maybe poison yourself, but you end up poisoning those around you as well, like trying to commit suicide with a gas oven and unwittingly murdering your neighbors.

I started puberty very late. I was nearly sixteen. And for complicated reasons this late arrival of my puberty caused me to stop playing competitive tennis. But before my puberty problem, I had trouble with my lower back and with my left testicle.

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

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

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

I hid my underwear beneath a parked Peugeot.

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.

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 promote my own self-hatred.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone.

I'm on the verge of a total breakdown. Sciatica. Taxes. Cars. Fleas, possibly. It's an absurd existence.

Unfortunately, I'm one of those idiots who knows everything about health and is in a constant state of alarm, and yet I continue to do everything I shouldn't do.

Anyway, what do women grab when they're nervous and sitting at their desks? Do they slip their hands inside their panties? What a distracting thought. Just the word panty is distracting. I love that word; it implies so much. I love how women look in panties, how they're flat in the front. I'm thirty-five, but sometimes it's still this beautiful amazing shock to me that women don't have penises. They just have this lovely little mound of hair and then this tucked away glorious hole. Hole. Wait. Hole sounds vulgar. Is passageway better? Pretty envelope? Georgia O'Keeffe flower? Pussy? Pussy is good. I like the word pussy. Tucked away beautiful pussy. I wish I could put my face in one right now and sing out, I love you!

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

It's very hard not to commit cancer suicide in America.

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

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 didn't think I was in a morbid mood, but it appears I am. My mind goes round and round trying to figure things out, but I always come back to the same two things: Loneliness and Death. Life ends before we figure anything out, most importantly how not to be lonely. Solitude is fine. But feeling like you have no one to love - abject lonliness - is not alright.

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

Aside from the possible scientific explanations for the death of ballsiness, there is an economic one, which I think may be the real cause: high rents. It's very hard to be a ballsy writer when you can't afford to live anywhere. It makes you absolutely nervous and insane and takes all yours guts away. I have to say this is the case for yours truly. If I could pay a 1954 rent of fifty-eight dollars a month, I might actually be a ballsy writer. But I'm so crippled by my enormous twenty-first century rent that I can barely get out of bed, let alone raise hell, which is what you need to do to qualify as a ballsy writer. You have to be a hell-raiser. You have to care about political things and you have to be able to afford booze, not to mention days lost to hangovers. But if you're worried all the time about having to go live with your parents as a thirty-seven-year-old, then to hell with hell. You only have one goal: to come up with the rent. You don't have time for political causes or all-night orgies.

Nothing wrong with changing your mind. That's a very unwaffling thing to say: "Nothing wrong ... " Who am I to say that there's nothing wrong with it? Maybe something is wrong with changing your mind. Anyway, love is very, very difficult. I love. But probably because I hate myself on some deep, sick level, it makes loving difficult. But I do try

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

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

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.

Then between Sixth Street and Seventh Street, my mood was vastly improved when I passed a good-looking dog, a dark brown Lab. We locked eyes for a moment - two lovers from a former life reunited - and I felt quite happy.

Essentially I'm a pantheist-agnostic. I worship many deities with equal amounts of confusion.

It's not easy taking care of one's self, determining nap lengths and all that, but with two people it's a manageable job.

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

I know I experience great consolation when my mouth is between a woman's legs. I think it must be because I'm drinking in her happiness.

No one I interact with - except maybe for family and strangers at the Russian baths and other weird places I may go to - is just friends or lovers with me: they also know something of my writing and this distorts their take on me

I was aware that I was acting atrociously but I couldn't stop myself. Rarely had I behaved in such a manner. But I guess when we're feeling lonely in life, we attack those who actually do love us. It's one of the things that characterizes human nature and can be summed up in one word: FLAWED.

I'm kind of an upbeat Hamlet.

As I followed Mr. Harrison, I picked up his salty, sweet odor - it pervaded the whole apartment actually - and I liked it. It smelled alive.

I was deeply depressed. I felt my brain slipping out of its casing and down my neck, like an egg sliding on a frying pan. So

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

There's no shortage of material in life.

The work changes the way your face changes and ages - it just does. Also, I have very little connection to anything I've written. I move on. We all move on

Don't hold me to anything in the book. I'm a waffler. I like wafflers. They said John Kerry was a waffler, but I admired him for that - showed he could change his mind.