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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.
Jesse Ball
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Jesse Ball
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Down Meadows
New York (former)
Would
Reader
Like
Imagine
Half
Snapped
Wells
Plight
Book
Description
Well
Stick
Feel
Sticks
Feels
Brought
More quotes by 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.
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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.
Jesse Ball
Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?
Jesse Ball
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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I want to say less, and it's easier to say less.
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I don't read books for pleasure, but in desperation.
Jesse Ball
I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.
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 have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.
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 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'm clearer now in what I want to say, and I know better how to say just that.
Jesse Ball
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
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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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
Much of my work has been done in first person.
Jesse Ball
I like small books. I like durable books. I like plain books. I like small type and thin pages.
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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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A person always has a chance to protest this or that.
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
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
