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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.
Jesse Ball
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Jesse Ball
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Down Meadows
New York (former)
Book
Minutes
Emerges
First
Boys
Enters
Take
Idea
Hole
House
Holes
Place
Ten
Ideas
Following
Might
Ground
Arrival
Firsts
Beginning
Arrivals
More quotes by Jesse Ball
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
That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!
Jesse Ball
Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?
Jesse Ball
I want to say less, and it's easier to say less.
Jesse Ball
I like small books. I like durable books. I like plain books. I like small type and thin pages.
Jesse Ball
I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and happenstance.
Jesse Ball
Much of my work has been done in first person.
Jesse Ball
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.
Jesse Ball
A person always has a chance to protest this or that.
Jesse Ball
I'd say writing is easier for me now than it once was, but I do less of it.
Jesse Ball
I'm clearer now in what I want to say, and I know better how to say just that.
Jesse Ball
I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.
Jesse Ball
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.
Jesse Ball
I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.
Jesse Ball
I don't read books for pleasure, but in desperation.
Jesse Ball
If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.
Jesse Ball
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.
Jesse Ball
Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.
Jesse Ball
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.
Jesse Ball
The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.
Jesse Ball
