Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Almost
Moralistic
Rather
Boot
Often
Pessimist
Sense
Humour
Problem
Boots
Think
Particularly
Thinking
Americans
Deadpan
People
Seen
Maniacal
More quotes by J. G. Ballard
God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there.
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
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
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
A reality that is electronic... Once everybody's got a computer terminal in their home, to satisfy all their needs, all the domestic needs, there'll be a dismantling of the present broadcasting structure, which is far too limited and limiting.
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
A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
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
If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.
J. G. Ballard
I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation.
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
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
Fiction is a branch of neurology
J. G. Ballard
Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
J. G. Ballard
An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.
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 Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.
J. G. Ballard
Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.
J. G. Ballard
Deep assignments run through all our lives there are no coincidences.
J. G. Ballard
Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.
J. G. Ballard
