Jonathan Ames
Jonathan Ames
Jonathan Ames is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs. He was a columnist for the New York Press for several years, and became known for self-deprecating tales of his sexual misadventures. He also has a long-time interest in boxing, appearing occasionally in the ring as "The Herring Wonder". In 2009, he created the HBO television series Bored to Death...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth23 March 1964
CountryUnited States of America
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.
For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone.
I don't laugh that much, but I do like humorous books, and I like to entertain readers that way.
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.
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.
After my first novel, my mother said to me, 'Why don't you make your writing more funny? You're so funny in person.' Because my first novel was rather dark. And I don't know, but something about what she said was true. 'Yes, why don't I?' Maybe I was afraid to be funny in the writing. But since then, seven books later, almost everything I've done has a comedic edge to it.
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
(S)ex scenes and bathroom jokes are my bread and butter.
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?