Quote

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

J. G. Ballard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

J. G. Ballard
Age: 78 †
Born: 1930
Born: November 15
Died: 2009
Died: April 19
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Shanghai
China
James Graham Ballard
James Graham J. G. Ballard
Writing
Work
Think
Thinking
Compensatory
Frustrated
Painter
Nothing
Sometimes

More quotes by J. G. Ballard

Image
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
Image
Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
J. G. Ballard
Image
I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.
J. G. Ballard
Image
So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun.
J. G. Ballard
Image
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
Image
All through my career I've written 1,000 words a day - even if I've got a hangover. You've got to discipline yourself if you're professional. There's no other way.
J. G. Ballard
Image
During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?
J. G. Ballard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
J. G. Ballard
Image
There is a British pop group called God. At a recent book signing the lead singer introduced himself and gave me a cassette. I have heard the voice of God.
J. G. Ballard
Image
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Fiction is a branch of neurology
J. G. Ballard
Image
Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.
J. G. Ballard
Image
I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
J. G. Ballard
Image
God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety.
J. G. Ballard