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
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
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.
A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.
To write about a place, you have to live there.
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.
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.
It's hard for me to think of writing a novel, because it takes so long.
I drink coffee. Without coffee, I probably couldnt write.
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.