J. G. Ballard Quotes

• Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Happiness

• The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Truth

• He believes that science fiction is the apocalyptic literature of the 20th century, the authentic language of Auschwitz, Eniwetok and Aldermaston. He also believes that inner space, not outer, is the real subject of science fiction.

  J. G. Ballard

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• The only truly alien planet is Earth.

  J. G. Ballard

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• Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Technology

  Tags in Mute, Science

• In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Funny, Humor

  Tags in Comedian, Sane, Freedom, Insanity, Madness

• I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn’t in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

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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

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• 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

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• 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

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• The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

  J. G. Ballard

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• Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• It’s true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

  J. G. Ballard

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

J. G. Ballard (28)

Birth:	15th November, 1930
Death:	19th April, 2009
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

About

James Graham "J. G." Ballard was born in Shanghai, China. He was an English novelist, short story writer and essayist. He wrote several novels include: The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, The Crystal World, Crash, Concrete Island, High-Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, Hello America, Empire of the Sun(won- James Tait Black Memorial Prize, shortlisted- Man Booker Prize), The Day of Creation, Rushing to Paradise, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, and Kingdom Come. His short story collections include: Passport to Eternity, The Terminal Beach, The Impossible Man, The Overloaded Man, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Myths of the Near Future, Memories of the Space Age, and War Fever. His non-fiction works include: A User's Guide To The Millennium: Essays And Reviews and Miracles of Life(autobiography).

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