Jonathan Ames Writing Quotations

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.