Jesse Ball

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“My bookshelves have no order. I prune them regularly and sell the books to Myopic Books, a Chicago bookstore. They give me store credit, and then I spend all the store credit, and, presumably, return to sell them back more of the books I bought from them.”

“As I sat in the office of the cure, he began to speak and explain to me what it was. I was there, and I had no choice but to continue, it seemed there was nothing but that, nothing else – and yet, it was being explained to me, almost without my permission, as a matter of course, this thing I did not understand: the cure for suicide.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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!”

“The move to hide aging is sort of sad. But it's a wonderful thing to celebrate our aging.”

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