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
There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour their next car will be.
I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton, and so they built and lived in houses exactly like these. I now know I was drawn here because, on an unconscious level, Shepperton reminds me of Shanghai.
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.
People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense of humour. The problem is that it's rather deadpan.
A general rule: if enough people predict something, it won't happen.
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.
People will begin to explore all the sidestreets of sexual experience, but they will do it intellectually. . . . Sex won't take place in the bed, necessarily--it'll take place in the head!
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.
The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.
Everywhere--all over Africa and South America . . . you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul. . . . This is the prison this planet is being turned into.
If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.
I admired anyone who could unsettle people.
There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.
There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter.