Top 61 Quotes & Sayings by Jesse Ball

I just think we're on this rock orbiting a sun that's going to go out, and I don't know that human society is necessarily a wonderful thing for the planet. I think people can be kind to one another and share things, but I don't know that this particular iteration of civilization is to be preferred to any other.

As humans, we're so easily persuaded. We join this cause or that cause, and suddenly the other thing is wrong.

When I was a child, my father would read out loud to my brother, my mother, and me. Several times in the course of my childhood, he would read 'Alice and Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' over a few weeks. They were a great favorite with all of us.

As far as I can see, the best writers in the last two hundred years have been Whitman, Rilke, Proust, Kafka. Their best works: 'Leaves of Grass - 1855;' 'Duino Elegies;' 'The Captive & The Fugitive;' 'The Castle.'

There's a misunderstanding about what nonsensical things are - the idea that they're just funny, and that's the beginning and the end of it. Nonsense is not 'not sense' - it operates at the edge of sense. It teems with sense - at the same time, it resists any kind of universal understanding.

My bookshelves have no order. I prune them regularly and sell the books to Myopic Books, a Chicago bookstore. They give me store credit, and then I spend all the store credit, and, presumably, return to sell them back more of the books I bought from them.

Malicious lying is usually a matter of need, but often the cruelest things we say are the truth.

The move to hide aging is sort of sad. But it's a wonderful thing to celebrate our aging.

To a liar, the most dangerous individual is the person who catches lies but doesn't say anything about it. Then the liar isn't sure which lies are compromised.

New York feels like sometimes it's not part of the United States. So does L.A. Chicago feels like it's a big city that's part of America.

The crucial thing in any work of any kind is that it must be a gift - the reader must possess it even more than the person who wrote it. It must be given completely.

If society is a ship, it appears to many to be firmly at anchor in moral waters. Perhaps this isn't so.

When I was in high school, I had a notebook that I filled up with rules about lying. It must have been a hundred pages long - one hundred pages of rules about lying!

I think it's a dangerous thing for anyone to have power over other people.

I probably like being isolated more than many people do, but I'm lucky to have the friendship of many fine people, and they keep me from becoming very isolated. The world of my mind is certainly a populated and warm place, too. It's difficult for me to become too isolated with such resources.

I think a book is often an account, or a series of accounts, that create a world that is sort of half of the world. There are references to a world, and then the reader supplies the other fifty percent.

I think the lies I make the most are in regards to my hopes and intentions for myself. As for lies I tell other people - I will certainly tell lies. When somebody is very ill and looks awful, and you tell them they look nice. Or if you just ate the last cookie, if someone asked me if I ate the last cookie, I would definitely lie about that.

I love to reread, even more than I like to read, so keeping a hold of books that I adore is very important, although they flee from me - they are always fleeing.

In life, people talk at right angles. One asks a question, and the other replies in part, then uses that part to move the conversation to something else. Everyone has an agenda, has something they're trying to say - or not say.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.

Lying is our stock-in-trade as social creatures.

Books should have a purpose. Books should be practical in some sense.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. " "What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?

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

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.

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

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

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

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.

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

We tire differently if we love or love not.

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

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

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

Three things are required of you: the wishes you made when you first knew the breadth of this life; the contract you signed when you decided your wishes were not true or possible; and the exacting of the punishment you agreed to when you knew you would break the contract of your life.

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

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