Interview: Jonathan Ames, author

It's not exactly Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, but the blond pine shelves at BookCourt in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, do confer a certain prestige in a literary-minded neighbourhood. So at a recent event, when a small crowd was leaving a reading from a graphic novel about the Cuban revolution by Inverna Lockpez and Dean Haspiel, it passed a shelf filled with T-shirts printed with the names of famous writers: Whitman, Poe, Vonnegut… Ames.

Wearing a frayed cap and threadbare corduroy jacket, Jonathan Ames stopped and pondered the maroon shirt. Ames, a 46-year-old neighbourhood fixture, looked more like a pedlar who sells poems for a dollar than a literary lion. "I'm the only living writer," he said, before heading back to his apartment a few blocks away.

Ames is famous, and not just in the quirky, coffee shops and bars of Brooklyn, which serve as the setting for much of his writing as well as Bored to Death, the HBO show he created, which is screened in the UK for the first time next week on Sky Atlantic.

After 20 years of struggling as a cult act – he has published eight books filled with cringingly frank comic accounts of his sexual misadventures and struggling-writer ennui – he has achieved the kind of breakout success that most writers dream of. As well as the HBO show, his novel, The Extra Man, was made into a movie starring Kevin Kline and Katie Holmes.

Success has changed his life, but only so much. Gone are the days of fretting about a bank account hovering around $800. Gone is the "carbuncle of credit card debt," as he put its, that reached as high as $30,000. Now that Hollywood has embraced him, he even pals around with a few movie stars.

Bored is about a floundering Brooklyn writer – who happens to be named Jonathan Ames – who tries to make it as a private detective. It has helped make the real Ames a face recognised more than ever around the neighbourhood, especially since his recent cameos on the show.

Fame feels different for someone who seems to balance Woody Allen's neuroses with Franz Kafka's zest for life. "The thing is, when these things happen, and we see them happening to other people, they think, 'Oh, they must be ecstatic,"' Ames says in his trademark deadpan, which makes him sound like an undertaker, each lugubrious sentence trailing off, as if he is losing the energy to finish it.

You are "still waking up in your body with your concerns and your neuroses and your sense of mortality," he says.

"Most of the time I'm still fretting," he adds. "If anything, now the fretting feels worse, because I shouldn't be fretting."

He's doing everything he can to not blow his windfall this time, unlike when he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. Besides paying rent, he says, "I totally splurged on training for a boxing match, taking women out for Champagne and oysters, and went to Cuba. The Guggenheim was gone in six months."

He still lives alone in the same one-bedroom third-floor rental he has had for 11 years. It's furnished with mismatched overstuffed chairs, which his landlord's cat uses as scratching posts. He picked up his kitchen table for about $10, "but I never eat at home, so it's just got papers on it".

Several years ago, a girlfriend moved out and took her bookshelf with her. He ended up with stacks of books on the floor for years (a detail he worked into the Jonathan Ames character on the show). Recently, the set designers for Bored took pity on him and built him a new set of shelves.

The jacket he is wearing is a leftover from a pilot he created. When holes appeared, he left it with the wardrobe people on Bored to patch. His shirt was from The Extra Man. "They sell the clothing at the end of the film," he says. "I bought this shirt for $5."

These days, he uses Twitter to supplement his material needs. When he posted that he wanted to come over to someone's house to watch the show because he didn't have a working TV, HBO bought him a flat-screen. When he shared that he didn't have a bicycle, a fan gave him an old ten-speed (it was promptly stolen).

With the exception of a beach house he rented in July – the first time he had a summer place – the only noticeable change is his slightly expanded social circle. Nowadays, he might drop in on the Russian-Turkish baths in the East Village with Jason Schwartzman, or take turns riding Zach Galifianakis's bike around Brooklyn with Ted Danson (all are stars of the show). He also gets invited to movie premieres, "which can be fun," he says, "because you get to see a movie for free, and then there's a nice meal afterwards. I'm still operating from that mentality. A free meal!"

• Bored to Death begins on Monday at 10pm on Sky Atlantic.