Jonathan Ames Quotes
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A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.
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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.
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To write about a place, you have to live there.
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I am part of a vast generation of people who perpetually live as if they just graduated from college.
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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.
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I've always been intrigued by Stockholm Syndrome. Reminds me of my childhood.
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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.
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For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone.
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I'm on the verge of a total breakdown. Sciatica. Taxes. Cars. Fleas, possibly. It's an absurd existence.
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For me, the past is dead. Can't go back.
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In fact, I have no hobbies. The only thing I like to do in life is to go to the Russian Baths in Manhattan. I also like to watch sports on TV, and I like to read books. So that's it - Russian Baths, sports, and books.
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I certainly want to portray the importance of friendship. I had noticed in movies and TV shows that friends often treated one another terribly, and my friends, the few I have, are never cruel to me or unkind, so I wanted to convey that.
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From age 23 to 44 - I'm 45 now - I was always in need of money, and I was especially in need of it from 23 to about 34, and my great aunt would always give me money, a hundred bucks, every two months or so, and a lot of times that hundred bucks made a huge difference - I could eat or pay a small bill. It kept me going. She gave me money. It was very loving.
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Personally, I've never had it as a goal in life to be happy. Seems impossible to achieve. Even the Declaration of Independence seems to acknowledge this. They talk about the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
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I don't like to publicly acknowledge being a Jew.
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It seems like the original 'Star Trek' could have gone on longer.
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I wish we had a dog in the show so that I could get to be a dog for a day.
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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.
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The reason it's hard for me to tweet is I don't want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.
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Then again, the name, the associations with a writer's name, can add to the reader's entertainment and pleasure.
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There are so many talented young writers named Jonathan, with whom by comparison I suffer terribly.
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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.
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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.
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I enjoy both TV writing and novel writing, and they are very similar. The goal is to entertain and amuse the audience, and I subscribe to this P.G. Wodehouse piece of advice: "Try to give pleasure with every sentence."
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I've really never written about my relationships, or things like that. I wouldn't want to divulge things that were too private.
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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.
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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.
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There's no shortage of material in life.
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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
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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.
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