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Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

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
Maybe
Two
Extinct
Dreamer
Species
Poet
Realize
Realizing

More quotes by 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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Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
J. G. Ballard
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People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense of humour. The problem is that it's rather deadpan.
J. G. Ballard
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I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
J. G. Ballard
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Hell is out of fashion --institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. . .
J. G. Ballard
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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
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In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
J. G. Ballard
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People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology.
J. G. Ballard
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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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Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.
J. G. Ballard
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The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.
J. G. Ballard
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Deep assignments run through all our lives there are no coincidences.
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.
J. G. Ballard
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Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.
J. G. Ballard
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If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.
J. G. Ballard
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An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.
J. G. Ballard
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Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
J. G. Ballard
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Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.
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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Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
J. G. Ballard