J. G. Ballard Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other.”

“At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to the boys as a punishment. They expected you to copy out, say, 20 or 30 pages from one of the school texts. But I found that rather than laboriously copying out something from a novel by Charles Dickens, it was easier if I made it up myself.”

“'Crash' is a metaphor for what I see as the dehumanizing elements that are present in the world in which we live. We're distanced by the nature of the society we inhabit from a normal human reaction.”

“I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation.”

“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.”

“I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenue in the western suburbs. It was a magical place. There were receptions at the French Club, race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse, and various patriotic gatherings at the British Embassy on the Bund, the city's glamorous waterfront area.”

“It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was not unusual.”

“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. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.”

“Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.”

“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.”