J. G. Ballard Quotes

J. G. Ballard (24)

Birth:	15th November, 1930
Death:	19th April, 2009
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 23rd May

Births

• 1967 - Charlie Hunter
• 1900 - Hans Frank
• 1954 - Marvin Hagler
• 1910 - Franz Kline
• 1882 - James Gleason

Deaths

• 1994 - Joe Pass
• 1783 - James Otis
• 2012 - Paul Fussell
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• 1945 - Heinrich Himmler

• In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Funny, Humor

  Tags in Comedian, Sane, Freedom, Insanity, Madness

• I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn’t in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• If you’re against globalisation, it doesn’t achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices of Shell or Nestle. You unsettle people much more by blowing up an Oxfam shop because people can’t understand the motive.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we’re sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we’re not.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• It’s true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Computer

  Tags in Nasty, Aid

• Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Technology

  Tags in Mute

• Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fiction, Invent, Superfluous, Reality

• A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Threat, Pornography, Widespread, Taste

• I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Future

  Tags in Boring