Quote

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)
House
Holes
Place
Ten
Ideas
Following
Might
Ground
Arrival
Firsts
Beginning
Arrivals
Book
Minutes
Emerges
First
Boys
Enters
Take
Idea
Hole

More quotes by Jesse Ball

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I'd say writing is easier for me now than it once was, but I do less of it.
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I don't read books for pleasure, but in desperation.
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I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.
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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.
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Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?
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I'm clearer now in what I want to say, and I know better how to say just that.
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I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and happenstance.
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A person always has a chance to protest this or that.
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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.
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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.
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I like small books. I like durable books. I like plain books. I like small type and thin pages.
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The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.
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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.
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I want to say less, and it's easier to say less.
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That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!
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Much of my work has been done in first person.
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If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.
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Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.
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I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.
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I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.
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