Jonathan Ames Writing Quotations

I drink coffee. Without coffee, I probably couldnt write.

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

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 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.

To write about a place, you have to live there.

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

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.

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