I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
I believe my friends think I'm funny. All the books are full of humor. Maybe it is a quiet sort of humor… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
As far as ideas about book design: I have plenty. But I also try and let people do their jobs. — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
I like small books. I like durable books. I like plain books. I like small type and thin pages. — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
“I mean that the book had better make life better better in at least six or seven definite ways immediately. Also, there… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part. — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
If Americans are to read something that is difficult, they will only do so supposing they will be admired for having done… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
A beginning idea for a book might be: a boy emerges from a hole in the ground. He enters a house. The… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
“-Lara is a weasel. I've always hated her. The only happy week I had as a child was when she fell from the roof… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
I'd say writing is easier for me now than it once was, but I do less of it. — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
“Our knowledge about ourselves is our least reliable knowledge. Yet, so thoroughly do we ordinarily champion our own cause that it is acknowledged effective… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you? — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
“We are born in this cemetery, but must not despair. -Piet Soron, 1847” — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different. — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal. — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another. — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
“Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you imagine what… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
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… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
“One cultivates one's life, one's friends, one's means, one's hopes. One goes from place to place, from triumph to triumph, in search of ambition… — Jesse Ball Copy Share Image
