Jesse Ball Quotes

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?

I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.

I believe my friends think I'm funny. All the books are full of humor. Maybe it is a quiet sort of humor that masquerades as not-much-at-all. It is certainly easy to miss.

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.

That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

Different times and different structures make more sense at one point in life than at another.

I want to say less, and it's easier to say less.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

As far as ideas about book design: I have plenty. But I also try and let people do their jobs.

A person always has a chance to protest this or that.

A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.

I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.

I am clearer in my mind and a bit less confused than I used to be.

I'd say writing is easier for me now than it once was, but I do less of it.

Much of my work has been done in first person.

If Americans are to read something that is difficult, they will only do so supposing they will be admired for having done it.

I begin with an image of some sort, just as if you saw something out of a window, and then went to the window to see what it was.

I don't start with an idea or concept in the sense that I flesh out an idea or concept and set it at the center of something.

A beginning idea for a book might be: a boy emerges from a hole in the ground. He enters a house. The book will take place in the first ten minutes following his arrival.

I'm clearer now in what I want to say, and I know better how to say just that.

I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

I like small books. I like durable books. I like plain books. I like small type and thin pages.

I don't read books for pleasure, but in desperation.

We tire differently if we love or love not.

I'm confused, and brilliant books help me to be less so.

The old man began to sing. His voice was very lovely and obviously a part of something that the world had disposed of in its haste, evidence of a grander, kinder past.

I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and happenstance.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

This is what we bear, I thought, the nearness of other lives.

The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.

I had a lot of trouble in school to begin with. I got left back in kindergarten, and I was in special education. My teachers didn't have very much faith in me.

I hate when I break my own rules. What’s the point of me being rational if I flail around like a clown?

If you want to say, Lucia, there is no inside of the park benches, I won’t argue with you. But, then you have to say where the pigeons come from.

No one explains this to you, he thought. That there are so many things without solution.

Of silence, I can say only what I heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave–and so speech isn’t itself, but its effect, and silence is the same.

– Some people forget, do you know – they forget what it is like to be young, to feel things ruthlessly, terribly. If you forget that much of life, well, I don’t know.

The world isn’t the place we are told to live in. It is another place entirely. We have both more choice, and less, than we are supposed to have.

We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise.