J. G. Ballard Quotes - Page 5

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• 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

  Ambition, Careers, Medicine

  4 Copy quote

• The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom.

  J. G. Ballard

  Ideas, Car, Machines

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• Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.

  J. G. Ballard

  Honesty, Modern, Mark

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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

  Hangover, Careers, Discipline

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• 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

  Honesty, Movement, Painting

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• The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.

  J. G. Ballard

  Stars, Energy, Orbit

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• An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.

  J. G. Ballard

  Art, Degrees, Use

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• Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?

  J. G. Ballard

  Self, Demand, Matter

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• If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.

  J. G. Ballard

  Smell, Garlic, Ifs

  "Criticwire Survey: What We’re Most (and Least) Looking Forward to This Fall" by Sam Adams, www.indiewire.com. September 1, 2015.

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• The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

  J. G. Ballard

  Art, War, Keys

  "Age of unreason". Interview with Jeannette Baxter, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2004.

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• 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

  People, Office, Shells

  60 Copy quote

• Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

  J. G. Ballard

  Writing, Thinking, Contentment

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• His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual. Besides, those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour and Dr. Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct.

  J. G. Ballard

  Christian, Mother, Father

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• In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant.

  J. G. Ballard

  Mind, Dying, Together

  J. G. Ballard (2017). “Crash: The Collector’s Edition”, p.38, HarperCollins UK

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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

  Home, Reality, Needs

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• 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

  Book, People, Pigeons

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• Nonetheless, Scranton had travelled in space. He had known the loneliness of separation from all other human beings, he had gazed at the empty perspectives that I myself had seen.

  J. G. Ballard

  Loneliness, Space, Perspective

  J. G. Ballard (1962). “Memories of the space age”, Arkham House Pub

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• The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.

  J. G. Ballard

  Life, Ideas, Confusion

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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

  Mistake, Europe, People

  "Cocaine Nights". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1996.

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• I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of a scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.

  J. G. Ballard

  Art, Knowledge, Science

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• 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

  Games, Lasts, Violence

  J. G. Ballard (2001). “The complete short stories”, Fourth Estate

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• Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.

  J. G. Ballard

  Self, Work Ethic, Kingdoms

  "A User's Guide to the Millennium". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1996.

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• In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.

  J. G. Ballard

  War, Legs, Gestures

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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

  Sex, War, Technique

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• Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

  J. G. Ballard

  Art, Generations, Safari

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