“In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.”
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Author detail
James Graham Ballard was born and raised in the International Settlement in Shanghai, China to a chemist. In 1943 the Japanese occupied the International Settlement and Ballard's family was sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, where they were interned for two years until the end of World War II. In 1946, Ballard went to England with his mother and sister, and stayed on in England after his mother and sister returned to China to rejoin his father. In 1949 he went to King's College, Cambridge to study medicine, but he began writing fiction and abandoned medicine in 1952 to pursue writing. In 1953 he joined the Air Force and was sent to the Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan to train. There he discovered science fiction in and he began to write science fiction. He left the RAF in 1954 and returned to England. In 1956 he published his science fiction story. In 1960 he committed to writing full-time.
Quotes
Showing 1-20 of 62
“In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.”
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“Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.”
“Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.”
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“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and...”
“First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he w...”
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“Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no c...”
“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 quan...”
“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
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“In 1949 - my father stayed on in Shanghai after the war. But in 1949, the Communists took over the whole of China, and in fact, my father was caught by the Communists in Shanghai. And he was...”
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“The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubis...”
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“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...”
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“I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction h...”
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“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, ra...”
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“Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There's nothing 'natural' about one's home these days. The furnishings, the fabr...”
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“E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made.”
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“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nig...”
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“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. Wha...”
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“My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned...”
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“Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of t...”
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“What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.”
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