Top 74 Jonathan Ames Quotes
#1. Recently, I've discovered Radiohead and find them to be quite good. So clearly, I'm some kind of musical retard. (Jonathan Ames, Middle-American Gothic)
Dave Eggers
#2. It's very hard not to commit cancer suicide in America.
Jonathan Ames
#3. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#4. I'm on the verge of a total breakdown. Sciatica. Taxes. Cars. Fleas, possibly. It's an absurd existence.
Jonathan Ames
#5. It was another sunny day, good for skin cancer and playing tennis.
Jonathan Ames
#6. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#8. One last thing on objectives - I like to make things, create things, so that's probably been the primary objective all along, even before the ego objective - to make. To record. But why record ... [that] gets back to the ego, a little. Oh, well. Making is good. I like to make things.
Jonathan Ames
#9. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#10. I've really never written about my relationships, or things like that. I wouldn't want to divulge things that were too private.
Jonathan Ames
#11. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#12. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#13. I do think everyone would be a lot happier if we laid eggs on our own and could just have friendship and didn't need to mount and penetrate one another.
Jonathan Ames
#15. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#16. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#17. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#18. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#19. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#20. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#21. 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
Jonathan Ames
#22. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#23. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#24. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#25. Something has happened where you almost never grow up in America. Maybe it's the greater wealth.
Jonathan Ames
#26. I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe I'm moving toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.
Jonathan Ames
#27. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#29. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#30. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#31. As a child, I wanted to be an athlete, a professional tennis player or something like that.
Jonathan Ames
#32. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#33. I don't really know the person who wrote the things I wrote. I kind of know him, but I change so much all the time that it's like I start fresh over and over and over and over. Writing-wise and life-wise.
Jonathan Ames
#34. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#35. 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?
Jonathan Ames
#36. 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
Jonathan Ames
#37. To write about a place, you have to live there.
Jonathan Ames
#38. For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone.
Jonathan Ames
#39. The reason it's hard for me to tweet is I don't want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.
Jonathan Ames
#40. The real self and the public self are intertwined, like a tumor around an organ, and you can't cut the tumor or you'll kill the organ, so they live together, until the tumor chokes the organ off (but which self is the tumor?). Or it's like something out of Star Trek. The Borg.
Jonathan Ames
#41. Then again, the name, the associations with a writer's name, can add to the reader's entertainment and pleasure.
Jonathan Ames
#42. It's hard for me to think of writing a novel, because it takes so long.
Jonathan Ames
#43. Try to think about more important things,' he said. 'Think about your soul, your character. Think about the freezer. It's a solid block of ice. It needs defrosting. There might a steak in there. Concentrate on things like that. There could be a meal in it.
Jonathan Ames
#45. I've always been intrigued by Stockholm Syndrome. Reminds me of my childhood.
Jonathan Ames
#46. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#47. A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.
Jonathan Ames
#48. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#49. I am always the source of the worst rumors about myself.
Jonathan Ames
#50. I don't like to publicly acknowledge being a Jew.
Jonathan Ames
#51. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#52. Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.
Jonathan Ames
#53. I'm actually much more shy and self-conscious than people's perception of me.
Jonathan Ames
#54. A lot of readers have actually helped me, been really sweet to me ... So maybe my cry for help has sometimes been answered.
Jonathan Ames
#55. People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.
Jonathan Ames
#56. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#57. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#58. I have very few hobbies. In fact, I have no hobbies.
Jonathan Ames
#59. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#60. Insightful and heartbreaking, but also wonderfully comedic in its gutsy honesty. A beautiful and powerful memoir.
Jonathan Ames
#61. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#62. I drink coffee. Without coffee, I probably couldn't write.
Jonathan Ames
#63. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#64. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#65. There are so many talented young writers named Jonathan, with whom by comparison I suffer terribly.
Jonathan Ames
#66. I felt myself falling asleep; my eyes were closing, and then I thought, Maybe I should just kill myself. Suicidal thoughts always sneak up on me like that. But I don't mind them. They're like aspirin. They calm me down.
Jonathan Ames
#67. I don't laugh that much, but I do like humorous books, and I like to entertain readers that way.
Jonathan Ames
#68. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#69. Essentially I'm a pantheist-agnostic. I worship many deities with equal amounts of confusion.
Jonathan Ames
#70. I am part of a vast generation of people who perpetually live as if they just graduated from college.
Jonathan Ames
#71. 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
Jonathan Ames
#72. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#73. 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.
Jonathan Ames
#74. 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.
Jonathan Ames
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