Quote

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

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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 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.
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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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I like small books. I like durable books. I like plain books. I like small type and thin pages.
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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'd say writing is easier for me now than it once was, but I do less of it.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?
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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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A person always has a chance to protest this or that.
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Much of my work has been done in first person.
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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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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