J. G. Ballard

“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.”

“I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.”

“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.”

“I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.”

“My father worked, and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house, I was chauffeur-driven with my nanny next to me to stop me being kidnapped.”

“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.”

“I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Chums Annual.' At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because Shanghai was an American zone of influence.”

“Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads.”

“Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known that war was imminent. But the cotton works were my father's responsibility, and duty then counted for something.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think it's terribly important to watch TV. I think there's a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of TV a day, you're just closing your eyes to some of the most important sort of stream of consciousness that's going on!”

“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?”

“No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession.”

“I admired anyone who could unsettle people.”

“In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at Lunghua camp, a former teacher training college outside Shanghai, where we remained until the end of August 1945.”