Jesse Ball Quotes

By making the place and the people and the feelings real, by the time someone closes the cover of one of my books, they have, hopefully, felt all of the emotions of life.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.

My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.

If you connect emotionally with the plight of those characters, ou feel what they feel and you walk away with a sense of understanding and empathy, and hopefully, something has been illuminated for you. And I tink that's what happendd for a lot of readers with my novels.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

I am not sure how a novel changes the world. I think it alters a reader's perspective by asking him or her to see the world through another consciousness. That can perhaps cause people to see their own lives differently. Or just give a single day, a single moment, a slightly different sheen.

The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

Nikki Giovanni! I got a book of hers from the library, and there was this woman who could paint me on paper with words - my whole little experience. I thought it was wonderful.

Books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr’s hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak—a whispering that enables us into its world . . . a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them.

I think it was simply word of mouth that made it a New York Timesbestseller for more than 60 weeks, over a year. People being moved and changed and transformed by the book [One Thousand Gifts] and wanting to share that with hurting people all around them.