Top 90 J. G. Ballard Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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?”

— J. G. Ballard

52. “Sooner or later, all games become serious.”

— J. G. Ballard

53. “If their work is satisfying people don’t need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.”

— J. G. Ballard

54. “E. Klimov’s ‘Come and See,’ about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made.”

— J. G. Ballard

55. “I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.”

— J. G. Ballard

56. “The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.”

— J. G. Ballard

57. “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

58. “A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.”

— J. G. Ballard

59. “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

60. “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

61. “Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety.”

— J. G. Ballard

62. “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.”

— J. G. Ballard

63. “After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.”

— J. G. Ballard

64. “They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.”

— J. G. Ballard

65. “People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they’re somehow discovering reality, but of course that’s just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer.”

— J. G. Ballard

66. “Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?”

— J. G. Ballard

67. “Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.”

— J. G. Ballard

68. “In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.”

— J. G. Ballard

69. “I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.”

— J. G. Ballard

70. “I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves.”

— J. G. Ballard

71. “The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom.”

— J. G. Ballard

72. “I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead – the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!”

— J. G. Ballard

73. “Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.”

— J. G. Ballard

74. “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

75. “Consumerism is so weird. Its a sort of conspiracy we collude in. Youd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.”

— J. G. Ballard

76. “Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.”

— J. G. Ballard

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

— J. G. Ballard

78. “I’ve never suffered from writer’s block. I have plenty of ideas, sometimes too many. I’ve always had a strong imagination. If it dries up I’ll stop and look for another career.”

— J. G. Ballard

79. “I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.”

— J. G. Ballard

80. “In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant.”

— J. G. Ballard

81. “During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.”

— J. G. Ballard

82. “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.”

— J. G. Ballard

83. “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.”

— J. G. Ballard

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

— J. G. Ballard

85. “But I wouldn’t recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

— J. G. Ballard

86. “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

87. “Enlightened legislation or enlightened social activity of whatever kind, does play into the hands of people with agendas of their own. If you legalize euthanasia, you provide a field day for people who like killing other people.”

— J. G. Ballard

88. “A general rule: if enough people predict something, it won’t happen.”

— J. G. Ballard

89. “Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.”

— J. G. Ballard

90. “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.”

— J. G. Ballard

91. “The car as we know it is on the way out.”

— J. G. Ballard

92. “Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War...”

— J. G. Ballard

93. “To the Insane: I owe them everything.”

— J. G. Ballard

94. “We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen.”

— J. G. Ballard

95. “Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.”

— J. G. Ballard