Quotes from Jesse Ball

I think the lies I make the most are in regards to my hopes and intentions for myself. As for lies I tell other people - I will certainly tell lies. When somebody is very ill and looks awful, and you tell them they look nice. Or if you just ate the last cookie, if someone asked me if I ate the last cookie, I would definitely lie about that.

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.

As far as I can see, the best writers in the last two hundred years have been Whitman, Rilke, Proust, Kafka. Their best works: 'Leaves of Grass - 1855;' 'Duino Elegies;' 'The Captive & The Fugitive;' 'The Castle.'

We tire differently if we love or love not.

I love to reread, even more than I like to read, so keeping a hold of books that I adore is very important, although they flee from me - they are always fleeing.

I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and happenstance.

There's a misunderstanding about what nonsensical things are - the idea that they're just funny, and that's the beginning and the end of it. Nonsense is not 'not sense' - it operates at the edge of sense. It teems with sense - at the same time, it resists any kind of universal understanding.

In life, people talk at right angles. One asks a question, and the other replies in part, then uses that part to move the conversation to something else. Everyone has an agenda, has something they're trying to say - or not say.

Much of my work has been done in first person.

A person always has a chance to protest this or that.

As far as ideas about book design: I have plenty. But I also try and let people do their jobs.

Malicious lying is usually a matter of need, but often the cruelest things we say are the truth.

I had a lot of trouble in school to begin with. I got left back in kindergarten, and I was in special education. My teachers didn't have very much faith in me.