Jesse Ball

“-Lara is a weasel. I've always hated her. The only happy week I had as a child was when she fell from…

— Jesse Ball

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

— Jesse Ball

“Our knowledge about ourselves is our least reliable knowledge. Yet, so thoroughly do we ordinarily champion our own cause that it is…

— Jesse Ball

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

— Jesse Ball

“We are born in this cemetery, but must not despair. -Piet Soron, 1847”

— Jesse Ball

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

— Jesse Ball

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

— Jesse Ball

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

— Jesse Ball

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

— Jesse Ball

“Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you…

— Jesse Ball

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is…

— Jesse Ball

“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…

— Jesse Ball

“The whole thing about people living on in memory is a crock of shit. The best you can do is try to…

— Jesse Ball

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

— Jesse Ball

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to…

— Jesse Ball

Much of my work has been done in first person.

— Jesse Ball

…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no…

— Jesse Ball

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

— Jesse Ball

“The action of a thing is the same as the naming of it - is, in fact, the real name. The trees…

— Jesse Ball

“The effect of untrue statements on casual conversations is one of my great loves, my great ongoing investigations.”

— Jesse Ball

“I shall introduce this city and its occupants as a series of objects whose relationship cannot be told with any certainty. Though…

— Jesse Ball

“…In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with…

— Jesse Ball

I begin with an image of some sort, just as if you saw something out of a window, and then went to…

— Jesse Ball

A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the…

— Jesse Ball

I don't start with an idea or concept in the sense that I flesh out an idea or concept and set it…

— Jesse Ball