206 Quotes by J. G. Ballard

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 substitute work of an unfulfilled painter.

There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.

Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they can change completely, and reveal unexpected depths and shallows. Will Four Weddings and a Funeral be seen one day as a vicious social satire? Could Jaws become as tearful and sentimental as Bambi?

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

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

Sooner or later, all games become serious.

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

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.