Jesse Ball quotes:

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

In a long life, said many an old man, this is but one more thing. Yet there were others who were young and knew nothing about the helplessness of life's condition. Did they glow with light? They did, but of course, it could not be seen. And all the while, the grinding of bones like machinery, and the light step of tightrope walkers out beyond the windows.

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

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

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

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

Much of my work has been done in first person.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

We tire differently if we love or love not.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

"¦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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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