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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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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
Discipline
Career
Careers
Written
Words
Even
Way
Hangover
Professional

More quotes by J. G. Ballard

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Surrender to a logic more powerful than reason.
J. G. Ballard
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Everywhere you look - Britain, the States, western Europe - people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake - a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.
J. G. Ballard
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Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War.
J. G. Ballard
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I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.
J. G. Ballard
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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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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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A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.
J. G. Ballard
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Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
J. G. Ballard
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A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
J. G. Ballard
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A general rule: if enough people predict something, it won't happen.
J. G. Ballard
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The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.
J. G. Ballard
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I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
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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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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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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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
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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
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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
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Sooner or later, all games become serious.
J. G. Ballard
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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