Quotes from Jesse Ball

When I was in high school, I had a notebook that I filled up with rules about lying. It must have been a hundred pages long - one hundred pages of rules about lying!

As humans, we're so easily persuaded. We join this cause or that cause, and suddenly the other thing is wrong.

I probably like being isolated more than many people do, but I'm lucky to have the friendship of many fine people, and they keep me from becoming very isolated. The world of my mind is certainly a populated and warm place, too. It's difficult for me to become too isolated with such resources.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.

New York feels like sometimes it's not part of the United States. So does L.A. Chicago feels like it's a big city that's part of America.

I think a book is often an account, or a series of accounts, that create a world that is sort of half of the world. There are references to a world, and then the reader supplies the other fifty percent.

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.

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

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.

If society is a ship, it appears to many to be firmly at anchor in moral waters. Perhaps this isn't so.

The crucial thing in any work of any kind is that it must be a gift - the reader must possess it even more than the person who wrote it. It must be given completely.

Books should have a purpose. Books should be practical in some sense.

I think it's a dangerous thing for anyone to have power over other people.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

Never fall into the mistake of believing, said the examiner, that things are everywhere the way they are here, wherever here is, wherever everywhere is.

And so well did they hide themselves in their love that grass grew over their hearts and all their loud songs became indecipherable ribbons of air.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the trouble 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.

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