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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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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
Writing
Uneasy
People
Gather
Allowed
Begin
Write
Dream
Feel
Feels
Unsettled
More quotes by J. G. Ballard
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
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
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
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
Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?
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
Sooner or later, everything turns into television.
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
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
The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.
J. G. Ballard
Surrender to a logic more powerful than reason.
J. G. Ballard
Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.
J. G. Ballard
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
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
Sooner or later, all games become serious.
J. G. Ballard
Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.
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
Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
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
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
