J. G. Ballard quotes - page 5

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)
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. View quote
J. G. Ballard
Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There's nothing 'natural' about one's home these days. The furnishings, the fabrics, the furniture, the appliances, the TV, and all the electronic equipment - we're living inside commercials. View quote
J. G. Ballard
One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it... could be dismantled overnight. View quote
J. G. Ballard
I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means. View quote
J. G. Ballard
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. View quote
J. G. Ballard
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. View quote
J. G. Ballard
The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic. View quote
J. G. Ballard
An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use. View quote
J. G. Ballard
I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves. View quote
J. G. Ballard
I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation. (J. G. Ballard)
I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres. View quote
J. G. Ballard
For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game. View quote
J. G. Ballard
In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous auto disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant. View quote
J. G. Ballard
Everywhere you look - Britain, the States, western Europe - people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake - a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation. View quote
J. G. Ballard
"If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.”. View quote
J. G. Ballard
All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms. View quote
J. G. Ballard
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next? View quote
J. G. Ballard
E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made. View quote
J. G. Ballard
People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they're somehow discovering reality, but of course that's just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer. View quote
J. G. Ballard
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)
Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper...there's a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet. View quote
J. G. Ballard
A hundred years ago one has the impression that people had made a clear distinction between the outer world of work and of agriculture, commerce and social relationships - which was real - and the inner world of their own minds, day-dreams and hopes. Fiction on the one hand; reality on the other. This reality which surrounded individuals, the writer's role of inventing a fiction that encapsulated various experiences going on in the real world and dramatising them in fictional form, worked. Now the whole situation has been reversed. The exterior landscapes of the seventies are almost entirely fictional ones created by advertising, mass merchandising... politics conducted as advertising. It is very difficult for the writer. 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. View quote
J. G. Ballard
We had entered an enormous traffic jam ... The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause. View quote
J. G. Ballard
It's a mistake to imagine now we're all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection – obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse. View quote
J. G. Ballard