Jonathan Ames
Jonathan Ames
Jonathan Ames is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs. He was a columnist for the New York Press for several years, and became known for self-deprecating tales of his sexual misadventures. He also has a long-time interest in boxing, appearing occasionally in the ring as "The Herring Wonder". In 2009, he created the HBO television series Bored to Death...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth23 March 1964
CountryUnited States of America
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 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.
(S)ex scenes and bathroom jokes are my bread and butter.
By saying I'd been up on the roof, I hoped to prove that I had intimate knowledge of how and why he'd died. It was my ego asserting itself: I was there, we were good friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish we had a dog in the show so that I could get to be a dog for a day.
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 always liked those characters in 'True Blood' who could turn into animals. I'd love to be an animal of some kind and run quickly through a forest.
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.