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" 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. "

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" I grew up in northern New Jersey - the banlieue of New York - and I now live in Brooklyn. I am separated from my parents by about 50 miles, but really there is almost no distance between us. I speak to them nearly every day. "

Jonathan Ames

New York

Live

Now

" I am always the source of the worst rumors about myself. "

" A lot of writers, probably because they're sensitive, which makes them want to be writers, have fears about their masculinity, so they overcompensate by having an interest in boxing and tough-guy things. "

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

" There's no shortage of material in life. "

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

Jonathan Ames

Dead

Back

" 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

Think

Matter

" I drink coffee. Without coffee, I probably couldn't 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 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 really recognise success. I don't see myself as on an upwardly mobile trajectory. I see myself as on the edge of a cliff about to fall off. "

" The reason it's hard for me to tweet is I don't want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing. "

Jonathan Ames

Anything

Hard

" 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. "

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

Jonathan Ames

You

America

" When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels. "

Jonathan Ames

Good

Teacher

" 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. "

" Twitter is so severe, you know? And it's completely for free, it's scattershot, and it's very easy to feel embarrassed. It's hard to be artful with it. It's like a ticker tape. It's not a forum that's worth mastering, you know? "

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

" 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. "

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

" No, I'm not very productive at all. I'm probably like an animal. I mean, great animals in the ocean feed all the time. I'm someone who procrastinates, worries, for most of a month, and then I'll have a flurry of manic productivity with a sense of great urgency and fear for, like, two days. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm actually much more shy and self-conscious than people's perception of me. "

Jonathan Ames

Perception

" I've always been inspired by Don Quixote as a role model of sorts, of the power of books to sort of make you insane in maybe a beautiful way. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As a child, I wanted to be an athlete, a professional tennis player or something like that. "