Quote

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

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
Three
Large
Back
Early
Come
Late
Work
Walk
Time
Walks
Morning
Tonic
Four
Gin
Hours
Afternoon

More quotes by J. G. Ballard

Image
If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
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
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
Image
Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?
J. G. Ballard
Image
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
Image
Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
J. G. Ballard
Image
I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
J. G. Ballard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
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
But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
J. G. Ballard
Image
Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.
J. G. Ballard
Image
A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.
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
So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun.
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
The suburbs dream of violence.
J. G. Ballard