Top 50 Jonathan Ames Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Oh, God, I don’t know what’s more difficult, life or the English language.”

— Jonathan Ames

2. “I have very few hobbies. In fact, I have no hobbies.”

— Jonathan Ames

3. “People don’t expect too much from literature. They just want to know they’re not alone with being confused.”

— Jonathan Ames

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4. “I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that there’s a pattern to my life, and if there’s a pattern, then maybe I’m moving toward some kind of destiny where it’s all explained.”

— Jonathan Ames

5. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

6. “I am always the source of the worst rumors about myself.”

— Jonathan Ames

7. “I promote my own self-hatred.”

— Jonathan Ames

8. “I’m on the verge of a total breakdown. Sciatica. Taxes. Cars. Fleas, possibly. It’s an absurd existence.”

— Jonathan Ames

9. “I hid my underwear beneath a parked Peugeot.”

— Jonathan Ames

10. “I’ve always been intrigued by Stockholm Syndrome. Reminds me of my childhood.”

— Jonathan Ames

11. “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

12. “There was a naughty grin on her face and she said, “Wait. You’ll get an erection and then what will I do?”

— Jonathan Ames

13. “Don’t hold me to anything in the book. I’m a waffler. I like wafflers. They said John Kerry was a waffler, but I admired him for that – showed he could change his mind.”

— Jonathan Ames

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

— Jonathan Ames

15. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

16. “There’s no shortage of material in life.”

— Jonathan Ames

17. “I’m actually much more shy and self-conscious than people’s perception of me.”

— Jonathan Ames

18. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

19. “For me, the past is dead. Can’t go back.”

— Jonathan Ames

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

— Jonathan Ames

21. “How terrible to be alcoholic. You just want to quietly soothe and maybe poison yourself, but you end up poisoning those around you as well, like trying to commit suicide with a gas oven and unwittingly murdering your neighbors.”

— Jonathan Ames

22. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

23. “I was aware that I was acting atrociously but I couldn’t stop myself. Rarely had I behaved in such a manner. But I guess when we’re feeling lonely in life, we attack those who actually do love us. It’s one of the things that characterizes human nature and can be summed up in one word: FLAWED.”

— Jonathan Ames

24. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

25. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

26. “Then again, the name, the associations with a writer’s name, can add to the reader’s entertainment and pleasure.”

— Jonathan Ames

27. “For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone.”

— Jonathan Ames

28. “The work changes the way your face changes and ages – it just does. Also, I have very little connection to anything I’ve written. I move on. We all move on.”

— Jonathan Ames

29. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

30. “I felt myself falling asleep; my eyes were closing, and then I thought, Maybe I should just kill myself. Suicidal thoughts always sneak up on me like that. But I don’t mind them. They’re like aspirin. They calm me down.”

— Jonathan Ames

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

— Jonathan Ames

32. “I drink coffee. Without coffee, I probably couldnt write.”

— Jonathan Ames

33. “Joe knew that all human beings are the star of their own very important film, a film in which they are both camera and actor; a film in which they are always playing the fearful and lonely hero who gets up each day hoping to finally strike upon the life they are meant to lead, though they never do.”

— Jonathan Ames

34. “My Caprice was a spacious cruiser, well insulated from the world – one motored along the highways as if sitting in a middle-class living room equipped with an engine and tires.”

— Jonathan Ames

35. “A lot of writing is a form of seeing – putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.”

— Jonathan Ames

36. “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

37. “The reason it’s hard for me to tweet is I don’t want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.”

— Jonathan Ames

38. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

39. “He was aware that he was not completely sane, so he kept himself in rigid check, playing both jailer and prisoner.”

— Jonathan Ames

40. “I don’t like to publicly acknowledge being a Jew.”

— Jonathan Ames

41. “As I followed Mr. Harrison, I picked up his salty, sweet odor – it pervaded the whole apartment actually – and I liked it. It smelled alive.”

— Jonathan Ames

42. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

43. “Something has happened where you almost never grow up in America. Maybe it’s the greater wealth.”

— Jonathan Ames

44. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

45. “It’s hard for me to think of writing a novel, because it takes so long.”

— Jonathan Ames

46. “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.”

— Jonathan Ames

47. “I’m kind of an upbeat Hamlet.”

— Jonathan Ames

48. “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

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

— Jonathan Ames

50. “I don’t laugh that much, but I do like humorous books, and I like to entertain readers that way.”

— Jonathan Ames