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Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

J. G. Ballard

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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
Elaborate
Customs
Sign
Sure
Burial
Decadence

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Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
J. G. Ballard
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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
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Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.
J. G. Ballard
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But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
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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
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Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?
J. G. Ballard
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Everywhere - all over Africa and South America - you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul. This is the prison this planet is being turned into.
J. G. Ballard
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They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.
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Sooner or later, all games become serious.
J. G. Ballard
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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
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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
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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
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I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.
J. G. Ballard
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Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques.
J. G. Ballard
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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
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In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
J. G. Ballard
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Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
J. G. Ballard
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If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.
J. G. Ballard
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The suburbs dream of violence.
J. G. Ballard
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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