Quote

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

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
Neither
Art
Reality
Real
Significant
Exists

More quotes by J. G. Ballard

Image
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
J. G. Ballard
Image
A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
J. G. Ballard
Image
A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
J. G. Ballard
Image
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
Image
Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Consumerism is so weird. Its a sort of conspiracy we collude in. Youd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.
J. G. Ballard
Image
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
Image
Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.
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
God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
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
Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood.
J. G. Ballard
Image
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.
J. G. Ballard
Image
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.
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
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Sooner or later, all games become serious.
J. G. Ballard
Image
The suburbs dream of violence.
J. G. Ballard