J. G. Ballard
J. G. Ballard
James Graham "J. G." Ballard was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalypticnovels such as The Wind from Nowhereand The Drowned World. In the late 1960s, Ballard produced a variety of experimental short stories, such as those collected in The Atrocity Exhibition, which drew comparisons with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In the mid 1970s, he...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth18 November 1930
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
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.
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.
I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.
Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
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.
Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.
Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.
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.
Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.
There is a British pop group called God. At a recent book signing the lead singer introduced himself and gave me a cassette. I have heard the voice of God.
After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.
The endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (were) a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning *everything*.