“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...”
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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 21-40 of 62
“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...”
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“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 ot...”
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“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 violenc...”
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“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the...”
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“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 obsess...”
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“Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You'd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to...”
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“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.”
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“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 fo...”
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“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 substitut...”
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“One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it... could be...”
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“I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external...”
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“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 broadcast...”
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“When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that wr...”
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“Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.”
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“The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't...”
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“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 perp...”
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“I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car bureaus. I like dual carriageways. When I see a CCTV camera,...”
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“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.”
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“Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?”
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“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...”
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