Jesse Ball Quotes

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

I consider projects very deeply, but there's always a point in your life where there's a bit of randomity.

Storytelling is what lights my fire.

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

I wish to God I was organized enough to tell you that, 'Yes, there will be 14 books, and this one will go here, and that one will go there'... but to be honest, I hardly know what I'm going to do when I get up in the morning.

I always leave room for serendipity and chance.

My life is spontaneous and things just kind of happen.

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

I think the worst that can happen in filmmaking is if you're working with a storyboard. That kills all intuition, all fantasy, all creativity.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.

Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

I quite like the element of surprise, and as much as I have my ideas, I always appreciate ideas that come from other people as well, and I love the mystery of not knowing.

My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive.

I'm not like J.K. Rowling, where I know there's going to be this number of seasons, and I know exactly what's going to happen. I would be so bored if that was the case. There would be no journey. There would be nothing to discover.

My act is sort of improvisational. I have a skeleton in my head, but no fat or skin on it.

Know your lines; otherwise, have an open mind because you want to get lost in the moment. When you have talented actors and directors to work with, then it's pretty easy to do.

Sometimes they keep us in the dark, but it's TV, so sometimes they keep us in the dark because even they don't know yet. You know what I mean? So, it sort of develops as it goes along and according to various needs that arise.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.