Something has happened where you almost never grow up in America. Maybe it's the greater wealth.

- Jonathan Ames

Now, all writing - all the arts - are a form of 'Pay attention to me,' but there's also the flip side. Like, I want to give something. Let me entertain you, let me amuse you, let me try to please you with this thing I've made. And then pay attention to me.

- Jonathan Ames

For me, the past is dead. Can't go back.

- Jonathan Ames

I am part of a vast generation of people who perpetually live as if they just graduated from college.

- Jonathan Ames

I didn't play or like a lot of board games as a child. I liked playing with my G.I. Joes and making up adventures for them.

- Jonathan Ames

I don't laugh that much, but I do like humorous books, and I like to entertain readers that way.

- Jonathan Ames

I don't like to publicly acknowledge being a Jew.

- Jonathan Ames

I promote my own self-hatred.

- Jonathan Ames

I've really never written about my relationships, or things like that. I wouldn't want to divulge things that were too private.

- Jonathan Ames

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

- Jonathan Ames

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.

- Jonathan Ames

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.

- Jonathan Ames

There are so many talented young writers named Jonathan, with whom by comparison I suffer terribly.

- Jonathan Ames

There's no shortage of material in life.

- Jonathan Ames

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

- Jonathan Ames

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.

- Jonathan Ames

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.

- Jonathan Ames

I don't mind being ridiculed - well, I guess I would mind a little, but it would only last a few minutes - it's all very ephemeral; it doesn't really matter what people think of me.

- Jonathan Ames

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.

- Jonathan Ames

I'm a somewhat isolated person in my own way, or I move along a little trail, I go this place, I go that place. It's not like I'm varying my exposure.

- Jonathan Ames