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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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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
Much
Like
Origami
Diploma
Arts
Degree
Degrees
Use
Art
More quotes by J. G. Ballard
By the eighteenth book, one has a sense of having bricked oneself into a niche, a roosting place for other people's pigeons. I wouldn't recommend it.
J. G. Ballard
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
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
The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.
J. G. Ballard
Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War.
J. G. Ballard
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
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
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
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
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
I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
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.
J. G. Ballard
Surrender to a logic more powerful than reason.
J. G. Ballard
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
The suburbs dream of violence.
J. G. Ballard
I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.
J. G. Ballard
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
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
Fiction is a branch of neurology
J. G. Ballard
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
