Jonathan Ames Quotes

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

I don't like rides. I take everything in life quite literally, and so I genuinely feel terrified on rides and liable to vomit at any moment, and I hate to vomit even more than I fear rides. So, all this to say, I don't have a favorite ride. I don't go on rides. Well, that's not true. A few years ago I had a beautiful, romantic moment on the Ferris wheel at Coney Island, known as the Wonder Wheel, and so I guess that's my favorite ride, though even that, to be frank, terrified me.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.

Unfortunately, I'm one of those idiots who knows everything about health and is in a constant state of alarm, and yet I continue to do everything I shouldn't do.

A lot of readers have actually helped me, been really sweet to me... So maybe my cry for help has sometimes been answered.

Whenever I wrote fiction, people always seemed to think that what I wrote was true, that it was entirely autobiographical. And when I would write non-fiction, they often accused me of exaggeration and fictionalization.

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.

Nothing wrong with changing your mind. That's a very unwaffling thing to say: "Nothing wrong..." Who am I to say that there's nothing wrong with it? Maybe something is wrong with changing your mind. Anyway, love is very, very difficult. I love. But probably because I hate myself on some deep, sick level, it makes loving difficult. But I do try.

I started puberty very late. I was nearly sixteen. And for complicated reasons this late arrival of my puberty caused me to stop playing competitive tennis. But before my puberty problem, I had trouble with my lower back and with my left testicle.

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.

Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.

My sophomore English teacher encouraged me to write for the school paper, and that's what got me started. Suddenly it struck me that being a writer could be a romantic and adventurous position. Previously, I had thought I would be a tennis pro, giving lessons at a local club. I thought that would be a good life, and it might have been.

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.